Chris’mas Story

Winter Light at Wild Turkey Road near Sebewaing, MI

Along about Exit 88 on I-94 Westbound, there is a plastic Santa Claus sitting on top of a steel fence post, part of an old woven-wire fence that separates the highway easement from a swampy horse pasture.  He’s back in there a little ways, hidden in the brush and hard to see.  It looks like someone was picking up cans, or generally policing the road bank, and found him there.  What do you do with a good Santa Claus that you may have found while picking up cans on a summer day?  Put him up on a post for others to enjoy, of course.  My wife, Jamie, and I rarely pass that way without trying to spot Santa.  He always makes our day.  We wave and say “Hi Santa!” Be it midnight on a Tuesday in June, or four pm on a random February day.

We don’t decorate for holidays much at our house.  We have dogs and a cat.  They wreck stuff.  We kind of feel that a lot of seasonal decorating is for retired people who have time and money.  Our money is tight and if we are not working we need to sleep.  Life has tired us out. We used to paint the town red every weekend, Hell, we’d give it two coats and stay up for 3 days to watch it dry.

Now we are exhausted, and things that mean more work  just don’t make sense to us. We’ve seen lights, we know a lot about conifers, and wreaths of arborvitae. Holly grows in the swamp down past the old farm. Seen it all. Did it. Know where it is if we need it, don’t feel the need to drag it into the house so we can clean it all up again in three weeks.

But if you want to see a couple in their 50’s get excited, just watch along I-94 at Exit 88 when we come by.  We’ll be craning our necks to see if we can spy Santa sitting on his perch, bringing joy to people like us, too tired to decorate at home, but not too jaded to appreciate the random gift of a stranger who thought Santa would look good on the fence.  It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if we start collecting  Santas to stick on fence posts wherever we go.  Decorating the house for Christmas is an overwhelming task.  For some reason scattering Santas around the countryside doesn’t seem like too much work.  Merry Christmas!

(Guest Blogged by Chris A. Ross, Attorney, and a BFF since 6th grade. Thanks, Tallz!)

Somewhere up near West Branch, Michigan, where the hills in the distance are sand dunes.

Leeanne’s Fish

A fish there is

That swims across the canvas

Right to left

Bull-shit free

and bold

Beautiful and bereft

Of nothing

 

An admirably plain-speaking fish

This was a fish when time was

Famous in the Catacombs

When the Christ was spoken of

Only in whispers

 

It wears its glory lightly

Down at the mouth, yes,

But don’t be fooled

Leeanne’s fish glows contented

In its own shimmering skin

It’s candid iridescence

Eases without ego

 

The dull water in which it swims

Into the background.

 

 

~ my friend, the musician and writer
Andrew Roddy, Gortehark, Donegal
Ireland on 17 September 2016 was inspired to
write this lovely little piece about my attempt
to paint a fish.

I love it entirely.

full of no words

of what I can’t say

that would sound soft

soft like

soft rain

soft sun

soft stars

soft touch

soft  soft  soft

soft mountain or

one toe in sand that I

also can’t move . . .

the wordless words

of my heart holding

so brittle still

 

 

(~ Marc died last night . . . too young)

“With No Language but a Cry”

The Coyotes surely understand it.

Their primal sound

melding death and birth, pain and passion.

Our Scottie dog surely understood it,

howling with all the agony of Scotland.

The mother cows

bleating their grief when their calves are taken…

The deer

stomping their hooves and rubbing their foreheads

in an expression of emotion

that leaves me gaping in wonder.

The parents wailing in a playground in Pakistan . . .

My friends waiting for six year old Sophi to finish yet another round

of chemo . . .

Pieces of ourselves flying off our bodies, flying off our faces . . .

Emitting no words . . . not even organized cries, only high-pitched gasps,

trying to knit ourselves, our faces, our children, our planet

back together.

~ Barbara Jalon Hiles Mesle © 3/16

the land of enchantment

Not that I could forget even for a moment, but this is Nuevo Mexico–the land of enchantment. Here the light is different. Brown is coral with copper and slate with pearl in bronze with smokey specs of silvery cerulean. My college friend Dan once said no one knows what is really happening inside brown until he’s gone to the desert.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. New Mexico also blends blue and green in a thousand ways . . . even the swimming pool water is turquoise. It’s like the lens I’m seeing everything through has also altered the function of color . . . color is not just what it looks like but what it feels like here.

Yesterday, my friend gifted me with a 90-min massage with a shamanic man I’ll call Merlin. It hurt so bad I cried . . . I mean he wasn’t going to stop pressing his point until I cried, and once I started, I couldn’t stop even when I tried. It wasn’t even about physical pain any more. He put his hand over my eyes and I saw those bright lights that happen in false darkness. Then Merlin traced my tears with his fingers across my forehead and up into my hair. Next, he cupped his palm over my eyes and said see the vision now. That’s when his hand became a night sky . . . a coyote started howling out of my own voice. I was both in that room and somewhere out in the desert under a dark cloth of stars and I wasn’t me.

This is, after all, the land of enchantment . . . it’s not like they try to keep that a secret in New Mexico. Says so right on the license plates.

– September 2014, Albuquerque NM

our lives made strange by loss

Last night as we brought ourselves together to mourn and heal, Reverend Rachel Lonberg of People’s Church (Unitarian Universalist) said a true thing . . .

What can we do but love the hell out of this world?

 

a common wicasa

Young Bear would not let me take a picture of his hands.  He was self-conscious about missing a finger, but not over the way it looked.  It was because he had cut it off during a Sun dance, and that was a sacrifice, not a photo opp.  He said I am going to tell you things you cannot speak about later.

I do not share those things . . . they are for sacred knowing not blogposting.

So I spent the next hour with him, who pointed out many times that he was not a Wicasa Wakan, a Sacred Man, but just a common wicasa.  Still, he was working to elevate his people on their spiritual path; he was the man who bridged them at Death (which is not real, he pointed out) over the North Star down the Milky Way to the Death Star.

At the end of the Milky Way is the place where the spirits face the Smokey Mirror for judgment.  But the judgment is not from the Creator, who loves and accepts all wicasa.  It is the reflection of our own fears, shames and beliefs about ourselves that judge us.  We judge ourselves.  He knows this and his function with the tribes is to teach the people self-love.  If they know self-love, then they can face the Smoky Mirror and accept the Gift of their Life.  He gave me this Knowing to share.

Then he said that he would give me a gift, too, that would help me.  What did I need?  So I asked him if he could tell me about the Eagle Dream I had.   He nodded.  After I told him, he kept his eyes down on his hands, on the finger that wasn’t there, and after a while he started talking.  He told me things about it that were not given to me before, but still entirely synced to what I knew about this Dream.  He added some things I didn’t know, and my heart swelled with the Truth of what I’d been given…how it was instantly known to this man, the common wicasa.

Then he told me that if I want to keep the Gift of my Dream, I must give him a penny.  An exchange of things of value must be made before I could own it, before the Dream was really mine.  Except that I didn’t have a penny, so I gave him the compass I bought in Australia last fall that was hanging on my camera bag.  He studied it, then nodded approvingly.  He took it ceremoniously and hung it on his keychain.  Now the Dream is mine, and it will now come to pass, he said.  Then he told me more things I can’t speak about, although I do not know why…why extraordinary things like this happen to me, an even more common wicasa.

(This happened to me in North Dakota, Summer 2012; reposted by special request of BJHM)

the sister wives of Ignacio Rocket on the Vernal Equinox

After an hour in the labyrinth of the French Quarter, Elizabeth remembered, “I think I know a place where we can dance—it’s near the water.” So we moved like a herd of cats towards what turned out to be a polka bar. “Perhaps I should have been more specific,” I said to no one who could hear me above the drone of accordions. My friends drank dark beer from a big boot being passed around. Elizabeth said, “Just let this happen to you!” Then she went off shrieking and leaping around the dance floor like it was electrically charged, bumping and battling for space. Lisa yelled over the din directly into my ear: GOOD GOD, THE POLISH ARE A CLUMSY PEOPLE.

Terri, Helen, Connie and I decided to find the gay bar instead. By now it was raining, so I shed my sandals and ventured barefoot into the late twilight. “There are diseases on the sidewalks here,” said Terri. “There is certain death in my shoes,” I countered.

Four sore blocks later, Helen said this whole night was beginning to feel like a pilgrimage. Terri said we should be getting close. Then Elizabeth was running at us from up ahead, “It’s up here!!” We had no idea how she got ahead of us. “My head feels like 11:59pm in 1999,” Connie said. There was no cover, so we all went in, absorbed by a purple haze of music.

The fog machine made us cough so Terri bought a medicinal round of drink. We danced wild and primitive to a pulsing thrum of ‘90s rock with one hundred of our closest, sweatiest new friends who indiscriminately gyrated against any gender. A tall skinny kid limboed into me . . . he asked my name and I said my name is too old for you . . . he looked affronted. WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? Well, of course that is the question ‘xactly I said… ah come on he smiled Sid Viciously don’t you wanna dance with me… sure ok I’ll dance with you and you and you and you dervishing around everybody until a little Filipino man constricted me. His eyes glittered and his hands slithered but he couldn’t hold me so he conjoined Connie who later worried that some sort of fully-clothed consummation might have occurred and Elisabeth admitted she, too, most definitely felt his filipenis, so hey, maybe we are all sister wives now.

Only Helen made the final leg of the journey with me, into the dripping wet night with naked feet sore from conflagration . . . stepping over the No Trespass chain onto an old loading dock tilting into the delta. We watched reverently on our knees as the Moon revealed a dabbled path of light across the water in the first hour of morning. Before the perfectly balanced scales of the cosmos, we silently spoke the names that weighed heavily on our hearts. We tossed flowers of their faces into ripples that widened with grace and absolution on the equinox.

 

~ Leeanne Seaver © 2012

Lookism

Finally, the wine finds a topic it likes and the conversation changes to his blindness…from a gunshot during his gang years…a look he wears very well behind his Ray-Ban’s at night in the sweater from the National Theatre Company of Norway where he just completed a tour of his one-man-show…I ask him what is the best thing about being blind… his face loosens, one corner of his mouth lifting a curtain peek smile    …he says he’s glad he’s beyond “lookism” altogether…that he doesn’t even wonder what people look like any more, in fact, he long ago stopped asking his friends to describe women to him, too…none of that mattered any more…he’d finally reached a calm resignation…this is the best thing, he says…that it doesn’t matter to him what anything looks like…then we go quiet…he adds that lookism is a blind thing…an attitude…and I say, well, it sounds pretty evolved to me…he shakes his head and shrugs…we sit quiet for a while longer…sure, I can take his picture he says

Finally, he speaks again from that quiet place where the wine has settled…that maybe it’s just that he is so bad at imagining what he can no longer see…that he is really lousy at it and tired of not knowing and worn out with asking, so, like all blind people, he adopted the mantra of not caring…and I don’t know what I should say to that…but it’s too late cuz the wine blurts out “the linen on this table is white and the plates are black”…he seems to stop breathing, he doesn’t move a muscle…so the wine goes on… about what our hosts look like…their compact bodies in warm coats with wool scarves…Matt taking care of everybody cheerfully…and Su’s bright eyes always scanning the crowds…how they assess asses in seats…report to each other with knowing glances…lean into each other later still in love…after the show when they took us to dinner at the Iridium…buzzed and soaked with Freda Payne crooning Summertime … while he and I sat there like February… cuz it is February…it’s always February now unless it’s November… and now here we are just as cold as they were warm… so I pour some more… you know, Freda has aged well and the boys in her band watched her trancelike, their fingers touching the keys and strings the way their eyes caressed her…the room heating up eazzzy…then I describe the lighting in the bar where we now sit, near closing time, all stark chromed sophistication with dozens of clear vases mounted in wall sconces each holding a single bloodred rose like in a mausoleum…  that the inset lights are purple and orange fusing the air into fuschia…the exact color everything blurs to…it’s blow on your eyes at 2am in Times Square…the neon stepchild of Dr. Seuss and Andy Warhol…now he leans forward, bending his head towards me…yes, nodding, he could feel all of that… he can’t see it but he can feel it…and the wine smiles slowly into the direction of my voice and asks what I look like as he sits back, stretching his long legs out, puts his hands behind his head, takes a deep drag of Manhattan and blows it out with a whistle… he ventures that I am a tall brunette with dark eyes… and the wine says, well… I’m not all that tall…

© L. Seaver 2012

Post Script:  On 3 August 2015, my dear friend and colleague Lynn Manning (shown above with President Obama two weeks ago) died after a very private battle with cancer.  He was a force of nature–an award-winning African-American poet, a gifted performer, a brilliant playwright, the inspired and inspiring founder/artistic director of The Watts Village Theatre Company in Los Angeles, and the former World Champion of Blind Judo.  At our annual Bridge Multimedia meeting in New York City, I was with him for the premiere of the Reel Abilities Film Festival in March 2015. 

It was another of those evenings when I had the privilege of seeing more than I ever do on my own.
I miss my friend Manning right now for the rest of my life.