Lean In

I am reading Sheryl Sandberg's excellent book Lean In. I understand that she makes some people mad. I am not one of those people, even though, at times as I am reading it, I feel inadequate because I am certainly guilty (again, at times) of NOT leaning in. But usually I feel that I lean in too much, so it's nice to have a breather from that particular Jiminy Cricket.

Patty came across this list of our tour dates circa 2002, when Love and China came out. Katryna's daughter was seven months old at the beginning of 2002, and by the end she was 19 months old. Katryna was most certainly leaning in.



January 5, 2002 Circle of Friends Coffeehouse - Franklin, MA
January 12, 2002 Barns of Wolftrap - Vienna, VA
January 24, 2002 Club Helsinki - Great Barrington, MA
January 25, 2002 Sanders Theater - Cambridge, MA
January 26, 2002 Woodland Coffeehouse
January 27, 2002 House Party- Holyoke, MA (tent)
February 2, 2002 Mass College of Liberal Arts - North Adams, MA
February 4, 2002 Taft Theater - Cincinnati, OH (o/f CAKE)
February 5, 2002 Palace Theater - Louisville,KY (o/f CAKE)
February 8, 2002 University of Rochester - Rochester, NY
February 9, 2002 Cornel Folk Music Society - Ithaca, NY
February 13, 2002 The Mint (Nerissa & Pam) - Los Angeles, CA
February 21, 2002 Makor, NYC
February 22, 2002 Wilde Auditorium - Hartford, CT
February 23, 2002 Owings Mills, MD (o/f Cheryl Wheeler)
February 24, 2002 Cherry Tree, Philly
March 4, 2002 Homegrown - TV in Greenfield, MA
March 5, 2002 CD Release Date
March 5, 2002 3:30pm For the Record - Amherst, MA
March 5, 2002 6:00pm B-Side Records - Northampton, MA
March 6, 2002 3:00pm Cutlers - New Haven
March 8, 2002 College- Gardner, MA
March 20, 2002 All Ground Up- Elyria, OH
March 22, 2002 12:30 WYSO Phone Interview
March 22, 2002 3:00pm WFPK - Radio Interview
March 22, 2002 5:30pm Ear Ecstasy - Louisville, KY
March 23, 2002 Canal Street - Dayton, OH
March 24, 2002 York Street - Cincinnati, OH
March 24, 2002 2:30pm WNKU -KY Radio (arrive by 2:15pm)
March 27, 2002 One Trick Pony - Grand Rapids, MI
March 27, 2002 3:45 pm WYCE (arrive at 3:15pm)
March 28, 2002 4:00pm Acoustic Cafe Radio - Ann Arbor, MI
March 28, 2002 The Ark - Ann Arbor, MI
March 29, 2002 Earlham College, Richmond, IN
March 30, 2002 Club Cafe - Pittsburg, PA
April 5, 2002 Pres House - Madison, WI
April 6, 2002 Washington Univ. - St Louis, MO
April 10, 2002 9:00am WFUV - New York City (arrive at 8:30am)
April 11, 2002 5:00pm WRSI, Northampton (arrive 4:45pm)
April 12, 2002 Valley Players Theater - Waitsfield, VT
April 13, 2002 Iron Horse - Northampton, MA
April 17, 2002 The Fez - NYC
April 19, 2002 The Fez - NYC
April 20, 2002 Towne Crier Cafe - Pawling, NY
April 21, 2002 United Church on the Green - New Haven, CT
April 24, 2002 12:00 (noon) WUMB - Dorchester, MA
April 26, 2002 Emerson Umbrella - Concord, MA
April 27, 2002 Wells College - Aurora, NY
April 28, 2002 Daffodil Festival - Meriden, CT
April 30, 2002 Rehearsal with the Kennedys in NYC
May 2, 2002 Cats Cradle - Carborro, NC
May 3, 2002 Birchmere - Alexandria, VA
May 4, 2002 Dar's Wedding
May 7, 2002 Reich Benefit Show
May 8, 2002 Brandies University - Waltham, MA
May 11, 2002 Sedgwick, Philadelphia, PA
May 15, 2002 2pm - Scholastic Book Meeting 557 Broadway (between prince & spring)
May 16, 2002 3:00pm WDIY
May 16, 2002 Godfrey Daniels - Bethlehem, PA
May 18, 2002 Unity Centre for the Perf Arts - Unity, ME
May 19, 2002 Iron Horse/Dylan Event
May 20, 2002 Amelia's Birthday
May 28, 2002 9:00am Meeting with Brian
May 28, 2002 6:00pm - Dinner with Philip
May 31, 2002 Democratic State Convention
June 1, 2002 Appel Farm - Elmer, NJ
June 2, 2002 NERISSA'S BIRTHDAY
June 3, 2002 LORI'S BIRTHDAY
June 7, 2002 Uptown Concerts - Baltimore, MD
June 8, 2002 PATTY'S BIRTHDAY
June 15, 2002 Clearwater Festival
June 16, 2002 King of Prussia
June 20, 2002 Club Helsinki - Great Barrington, MA
June 22, 2002 Ruth Eckard Hall- Clearwater, FL
June 29, 2002 Forksville Folk Festival, Forksville, PA
July 3, 2002 Kennedy Center- Washington, DC
July 5, 2002 The Garage - Winston Salem
July 6, 2002 ENO - Festival
July 18, 2002 The Palms- Davis, CA
July 19, 2002 Freight and Salvage - Berkeley, CA
July 20, 2002 California World Music Festival - first show at 1:30pm
July 21, 2002 California World Music Festival 11:30am
July 27, 2002 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival
July 28, 2002 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival
August 2, 2002 IMAC - Huntington, NY opening for Dar ($200)
August 7, 2002 Red Sox vs. Oakland A's
August 17, 2002 Levitt Pavillion- Westport, CT
August 18, 2002 House Concert- Falls River, MA
August 23, 2002 Ottawa Folk Festival
August 24, 2002 Ottawa Folk Festival
August 25, 2002 Ottawa Folk Festival
August 27, 2002 Transperformance - CANADA
September 2, 2002 LABOR DAY
September 6, 2002 Acoustic Cafe - Bridgeport, CT
September 7, 2002 Alfred University - Alfred, NY
September 13, 2002 Long Island House Concert
September 14, 2002 Harvest Moon Festival - Warwick, NY
September 24, 2002 Towsen University - Towsen, MD $1900
September 27, 2002 FEZ - NYC
September 28, 2002 Stone Soup - Providence, RI
October 4, 2002 South Shore Folk Music Club - Kingston, MA
October 5, 2002 Iron Horse - Northampton, MA
October 9, 2002 Paul Smiths College
October 12, 2002 Somerville Theater - Somerville, MA
October 13, 2002 Grey Goose
October 18, 2002 WAMC - Albany, NY
October 19, 2002 Towne Crier-Pawling, NY
October 20, 2002 Night Eagle - Oxford, NY
October 25, 2002 Me and Thee - Marblehead, MA
November 1, 2002 Tin Angel - Philadelphia, PA
November 2, 2002 Roaring Brook Concerts - Canton, CT
November 14, 2002 Penn State Dubios
November 15, 2002 Club Cafe - Pittsburgh
November 16, 2002 12 corners coffeehouse Rochester
November 22, 2002 McCabe - Los Angles
November 23, 2002 Tracktor- Seattle
November 28, 2002 THANKSGIVING
December 6, 2002 Birchmere-Alexandria VA
December 7, 2002 Titusville, NJ
December 13, 2002 Opera House - Newport, HN
December 14, 2002 Joyful Noise Coffeehouse-Lexington, MA
December 31, 2002 First Night Northampton

Now, when I was having my first baby, this is what we sent out to fans:

A picture (or touring schedule) is worth a thousand words. I can't believe how hard we worked twelve years ago when our first duo CD came out. And at the time, it seemed we were slacking, since it was way fewer dates than we'd played as a band. I saw my bed (and my dog) a lot more in 2002 than I had in 2000, or 1998. But today, just looking at this list makes me exhausted.

I will (I hope) say something more intelligent about Lean In when I finish it, but right now I have to get our Nields News out to you. (If you don't get Nields News, go to our web page www.nields.com and subscribe!) For now I will leave you with this, from Sheryl Sandberg (though not original with her):

Done is better than perfect.

Post-Diluvian and My Own Weird Climate Change

I can’t shake the images of the water flushing through the Subway entrances and exits, the cars floating in the parking garages of lower Manhattan. The eeriest thing about these pictures is that I’ve seen them before—in my mind’s eye after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, six and a half years ago. I left the movie theatre on that scorching June day resolved to do whatever it would take to be a climate change activist, or at least an awake aware person doing her tiny little cloth-diapering, biodiesel-driving part. “Well, now we know,” I said to Tom. “Knowledge is power. Certainly after learning what this movie taught us, we’ll begin, as a country, as a unified world, to change our fossil-fuel burning ways.” I’d had a similar optimistic thought in 1981 when I was 14 and I first learned about nuclear war. Now that we have this power, I reasoned, we’d never use it. We’d know better. War, surely, was obsolete now.

Al Gore and his ilk were predicting the kinds of floods we saw earlier this week to occur in about fifteen to twenty years, if memory serves. When climate change aficionados spoke of receding coast lines, as a former New Yorker I thought first of my sister’s in-laws on West 4th street and Red Hook and wondered if it was wise for them to continue to live where they lived. Maybe in ten years they should think about selling, I thought. Property values won’t diminish much between now and then. I imagined the waters rising up over the Henry Hudson, taking the joggers and the cyclists along with them.



Earlier this year, in July, I experienced my own weird climate change. For the first time in 16 years, I got my period. Without getting too personal and TMI, I’ll just say that the stress of my years on the road in my twenties had taken a pretty significant toll, and one doctor on my case back in the 90s had commented, “Evolution takes pretty good care of these things. You wouldn’t want the matriarch of a starving tribe to be pregnant with twins.”

My bandmates thought that was uncannily apt.

I did everything I could to restore my cycles, trying acupuncture, diet, yoga, alternative healers, psychics and finally western medicine. With the help of a talented endocrinologist, not to mention a patient and loving husband, I was able to conceive and deliver two gorgeous healthy babies. And then a few months after the last one weaned, to my great surprise I discovered I was menstruating.

At the age of 45, chances of my getting pregnant are slim, but not impossible. Every month when I feel that twinge in my side, I start doing the math: if I conceived now, would it interfere with Falcon Ridge? If we had three kids would we have to ditch our extremely fuel efficient Jetta wagon for a minivan? Could we pay three violin tuitions per year? (The answers: yes, yes and no). More importantly, how would a younger sibling impact the two I already have and cherish and want to give the world to? I know the answer: I asked them. “Nah,” is what they each said. No baby brother or sister, thanks. They are smart enough to know that the emotional resources around here are scarce.

I say that with no self-deprecation, which is new for me. I’ve spent the past 6 years feeling guilty about the quality of my mothering: that I am too distracted by my career, too spiritual, too ADD, not willing enough to get down and play with them on the floor, not silly enough, not strict enough, not crafty enough, not soft and flabby enough. I knew about the mom wars, and I thought I was too smart to fall victim to them. I was wrong.

But I got my feminist on recently; probably sometime around Mitt Romney’s reference to his binders full of women. I got reminded by some kick-ass mom friends of mine that motherhood is the hardest goddamned job on the planet, and one that rarely wins its practitioners the Nobel or a Grammy (no pun intended). When a girl was raised to be everything she could be career-wise; when she has a deep abiding love of something other than family (art, God, humanity, the Beatles) and then tries to excel at Motherhood as if it were just another arena, she is doomed. Not that I know this personally.

I’ve gone back to the Winnecott mantra: don’t even try to be a good mother; just be a good enough mother. Just good enough. See this as a long marathon, not a sprint. Your reviews after one evening’s meal and violin practice might be scorching one day, but you’re in this for the long haul. Get the food into the kids. Get their practice in. Read them a book. Cuddle them until they fall asleep. Rinse, repeat. When Elle was an infant and I was on hallucinogens (metaphorically speaking),a friend of ours--father of 2 teenagers--said that he experienced parenthood as being like working in a button factory. “It’s mind numbingly boring,” he drawled. I could not begin to relate then, but now it’s a relief to know that some others feel this way too.

Oddly, as I began to accept myself as wholly imperfect and frustrated, something shifted. I stopped feeling so frustrated. It might have helped that they’ve moved on from 24-piece jigsaw puzzles to those new Lego trucks and campers which I find so thoroughly absorbing that I am tempted to work on them on my own when the kids are at school. So I actually am on the rug with them more these days. (Elle recently said, “Mama! Go away! They are my Legos! Stop playing with them!”) It’s also helped immeasurably that I know this is the last year I have a preschooler, and I am in that sweet spot of treasuring each day I have with him. (Which doesn’t preclude me from sitting him in front of Thomas the Tank Engine so I can get my writing done, as I did today. Also, did you know that Ringo narrates Thomas’s earliest episodes?)

Here's the thing. Even though every part of my rational mind knows that I should not have another child, and for most of the month I really don't want another child, for those two or three days when I am ovulating, all I want to do is procreate. And no, I am not endorsing this insane article suggesting that women while ovulating were more likely to vote for Obama. I am just saying that even I, a well-educated mostly sensible person who has deep roots in addiction recovery, have a hard time not just going for what I want when I want it. If someone with my level of dedication to restraint (not to mention fear of what others will think of me) could lapse and find herself with child, what hope is there that billions of people will voluntarily band together and agree to drive a lot less, consume a lot less, procreate a lot less?

A child is supposed to grow up. I am supposed to feel the gap, feel the grief of separation. It’s part of life. Losing Manhattan—not so much. So this new ache in my heart, this helpless helpless feeling, I can’t get my mind around. I am left, yearning for connection with others who are willing to seek answers, policies, leaders who can speak the truth about what’s happening and give us orders. We can’t dig ourselves out of climate change perfectly, and we probably can’t even slow it down, even if we were a united front. I am left with these words from Job:
38 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said:
2 “Who is this who darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
3 Now prepare yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer Me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
7 When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
8 “Or who shut in the sea with doors,
When it burst forth and issued from the womb;
9 When I made the clouds its garment,
And thick darkness its swaddling band;
10 When I fixed My limit for it,
And set bars and doors;
11 When I said,
‘This far you may come, but no farther,
And here your proud waves must stop!’
12 “Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
And caused the dawn to know its place,
13 That it might take hold of the ends of the earth,
And the wicked be shaken out of it?
14 It takes on form like clay under a seal,
And stands out like a garment.
15 From the wicked their light is withheld,
And the upraised arm is broken.

42 Then Job replied to the LORD:
2 “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”

September Garden and Life is in the Practice

I look out at my garden these days and drink it in, knowing that by Saturday morning it will likely be gone. All that work in September. Worth every bit for these morning viewings from the couch in the new kitchen. St. Francis in the foreground, Kuan Yin in the back. But still, it breaks my heart that in a few days the pansies and impatiens will be gone forever, and the cone-flowers and hydrangea will wilt and brown.

Jay has had four violin lessons and one group class. It’s so strange to see how different two children can be. After years of telling friends that my kids were more alike than not, as violinists at least they show their proclivities. Elle’s bow-hold was right-on from the start; Jay grabs his fat marker in his fist and doesn’t comprehend that one does not wield it like a sword. We are supposed to be clapping out each of the six Twinkle variations to our new teacher’s words, but Jay wilts after one-half of one, where Elle dashed ahead, graduating from her Twinkles in less than nine months. I take his fists in my two hands and tap them together for claps, but he says, “Dis gives me a stomach ache.” And more painfully, “Dis is my body and I get to do what I want!” Who can argue with that?

In Paul Tough’s new bestseller How Children Succeed (which I am supposed to be reading but haven’t started yet, but I did listen to half the This American Life piece about it) he argues that the skills most necessary to teach kids are self-control, to learn to focus attention, and to delay gratification. The exercises our teacher gives us are all about these skills. We start with a bow in which Jay says, “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” or “Good evening,” depending on what time it is. We listen to the Suzuki Slow Twinkle CD and clap along, as I said above, and we listen to the Twinkles up to speed while he sways back and forth, his feet in playing position and his box violin on his shoulder. Then we do “Up Like a Rocket” with his pen-cum-bow and his bunny bow-hold. He wants to make up his own lyrics, but his teacher insists on hers. Delay gratification. He wants to make his pen go horizontally for “back and forth like a choo choo train,” but his teacher makes him keep it vertical. Self control. He ends each practice with “Thank you for the wonderful lesson,” and a bow. Nothing to complain about that. It’s teaching him good manners.

So why is this all so hard for me? Because he doesn’t always want to do any of it, and I feel foolish, frustrated, helpless, and most of all like a Tiger mom. A failed Tiger mom at that. We set up his foot chart (a 20″ cardboard with construction paper cut outs of his feet positions) and it can take 20 minutes for him to get in rest position and bow. Before he can do this, he has to fall on the floor a few times, balance on one foot and go, “Whoa! whoa!” and wave his arms around, ask for a drink, decide he has to pee, take off his shirt, roll up his pants legs, look out the window to see if Gulliver the Cat has come over, look out the window to see if his dad has biked home yet, set up his favorite cars to watch the practice, go get his ducky to watch the practice, count the marbles in his marble jar and then fall on the floor crying and insisting he hates violin and never wants to play again.

And we haven’t even picked up the actual violin.

Elle’s teacher Emily Greene says that whatever you are dealing with in terms of family dynamics will come out in the violin practice. As an author, and a teacher of writing, I notice that whatever is hard for me in life is hard for me on the page, and so it goes with my students. If a student doesn’t know herself, it is hard for her main character to be known. If a student is impatient and in a hurry, her scenes will skim by. If a student is fluent in the language of emotion but slow to take action, her scenes will be rich studies of humanity but lacking plot. And if a person cares more about being liked and well-thought of by teachers and other authority figures (but not little boys) and is the tiniest bit afraid of confrontation, violin practice sessions can turn into the Clash of the Titans.

Today I wised up. I looked at what we were being asked to do and decided to do exactly the minimum amount needed to make both of us feel like we had some kind of productive practice. Jay can’t make it through even one Twinkle, either in the swaying exercise or the clapping one. Our teacher doesn’t know this because I haven’t told her. Instead I have brought her practice sheets covered with stickers (and let’s be truthful: the stickers are for me, not Jay. I am the one who puts them on and gets a big hit from seeing them taking over the yellow lines of the paper.) But I will go in on Thursday and tell her we need to slow down, even though progress seems snail’s-paced to me as it is. And this morning, I got down a shaker of non-pareilles which I used to bribe him to do each item on our practice sheet. I had Jay bow, do one Twinkle variation for swaying, one for clapping and his "Up Like a Rocket." It all took five minutes. I hugged him and praised him and he bowed deeply. “Sank you for a wonderful lesson,” he murmured.

He may or may not continue with the violin. He may be a perennial or an annual. What matters is that he get this space each day, this moment of my full attention and love (which includes structure, boundaries, firmly holding the line) the way I have my moments with the pansies and St. Francis every morning.

Practicing it Up in the Garden

My niece, with her band, has recorded her first single, which she wrote, sings lead on and plays bass on. It's a rocking song called "Speak Up!" and my kids just got their mitts on a CD of it.

"Speak up, stand up/Don't let anyone tell you what to do..." sings my 6-year-old daughter, along to her beloved cousin's vocal. Her little brother Jay mimes playing the descending bass line. We've listened to the song four times in a row. I am blown away by the confidence, the mastery, the reedy sweetness of the eleven-year-old voice. And, to make matters even more delightful, the song is about music itself, and the deliciousness of coming into one's identity as a young musician:

"In music there are no lines to cross/In your own song you are always the boss."

Tom and I just came from a Suzuki parent class, a two-hour affair held for all parents of Suzuki kids of all instruments. I felt tearful--in a good way--by the end of it. Other parents shared their reasons for taking on what is the equivalent of a college class (and we're talking about just the parents' role here!):
-"It gives my son confidence and something he can be proud of."
-"It teaches my daughter that if you practice something, you will get better."
-"If I am there to guide them, it keeps them from laying down the wrong neural pathways," -"This is an opportunity to give my child the ability to master something."
-"She whistles the themes of the music all day long!"

Interestingly, none of the parents said, "Because I want my child to be the next Joshua Bell." Everyone present was more interested in process than product. In fact, the teacher (Emily Greene) even referred to playing the violin as a by-product of the method. The real fruits are compassion, frustration tolerance, self-control, appreciation of beauty, self-esteem and a closer parent-child relationship.

I am all for all of this. And the above are the reasons I show up day after day to the practice sheet our teacher makes and insist Elle pick up her fiddle and play her repetitions of "Allegro" and "Witches' Dance," even when she responds by becoming boneless and falling onto the floor. But I would add to the list: a life-long relationship with music.

We parents also went around and shared what is hardest for us about Suzuki. Most said the conflicts arising around practice. I added that for me the biggest fear is the thought that plays in my head when Lila doesn't want to practice and I am making her: I am destroying her love for music!

Why do I have this thought? Because sometimes I hear from other rock musicians that they were forced to take music lessons when they were kids and they hated "that classical sh*t." (Of course, they went on to become professional drummers...) Or because my father said he hated having to practice his cello growing up (of course he plays guitar now, all the time, whenever he can get his hands on it, and no one makes him...) Or that my daughter herself says, "I'm sick of practicing!" (But if I tell her she can quit, she immediately goes running for her instrument.)

Music is hard. There's no getting around the fact that in order to play half decently one has to put in some hours. And most musicians have some kind of internal struggle with practicing. (Some don't. My friend Pete Kennedy told me he still practices 3-5 hours a day, and I can't imagine he "makes" himself do this. His guitar seems like an appendage of himself.) But anything worth having a lifelong relationship with takes time and perseverance and has hard spots. Somehow we (I) get the idea that music should be all pleasure. Nothing is all pleasure. Everything that matters in life takes work: getting to see a great view from the top of a mountain. Having an incredible relationship with another person. Writing a beautiful poem. Painting a picture. Creating a garden from a patch of weeds.

"At the outset of lessons, neither parent nor child counted on the struggles that can often come between them during practices. First lessons often start after children have seen other children performing – or perhaps playing games in group class. The parent-child duo takes up an instrument with beautiful images of working together happily to produce delightful sounds. There’s usually a honeymoon period, but before long, parents begin to realize that the work of practicing resembles gardening with your bare hands more than arranging fresh flowers in a vase. (And don’t be fooled: even the parents who appear that have practices as graceful as an ikebana also run into a thorn now and then.)

"An important truth from gardeners can help parents who practice with their children: you can’t tug on a play to make it grow. You have to trust the process. But there’s nothing wrong with fertilizing, watering, and generally caring for a plant. That’s what gardeners do. Parents need to do it as well. In the process of tending beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetables, gardeners also encounter weeds. And pests. They also get some dirt under their fingers. In their own way, so will parents.” (from "Building Violin Skills," Ed Sprunger)

This beautiful quotation from the Suzuki teacher, violinist and psychotherapist Ed Sprunger hit me where I lived yesterday when Emily read this to us. As a writer and a teacher of writing, I realized the universality of this thought. You can't tug on your writing, either. You can't tug on your relationship. You have to leave space for the serendipitous, like your 11-year-old-budding-rock-star niece lighting a fire under your 4-year-old pre-Twinkler. For as soon as he'd finished listening to his cousin's single (5 times in a row,) Jay, who just had his first lesson last Thursday, grabbed his tiny 1/16th size violin and started playing her pop song's rhythm on the E string.

Between Friends

Lilacs about to burst, three weeks before they usually do.

My friend Andrea Raphael died on Good Friday. My writing mentor and teacher Anna Kirwan died on Easter Sunday. Two dear friends got diagnosed with cancer last week. My husband Tom turned 50. And our new CD The Full Catastrophe came out. It's a liminal time, the Mayan apocolypse notwithstanding, and once again all signs point to salvation resting in being awake to the here and now. I wrestle with this every moment of the day. A strange, firm undertow constantly drags me into my thoughts, my thoughts, my clammoring thoughts. My fears about the future, my curiosity about everyone in the world which sends me to Hell (AKA Google) over and over again. I wish I could say that these many wake up calls--the deaths, the diagnoses, the birthday parties, the one movie we managed to see (over a period of 2 days), the imminent work of promoting an album--had worked to wake me up fully. In a way they have; perhaps we can only be as awake as we can be in any given time. Today, I am sobered, but still sleepy.

The movie we saw was The Tree of Life, an amazing film my Terrence Malik about life, death, the big bang, heaven, and a beautiful, doomed, brave, typical, unique family in the 50's in Waco TX. All of this made me think that this week's Song of the Week should be "Between Friends."

I wrote this song during February Album Writing Month 2009, right before I took a self-imposed leave from my life coaching practice in order to spend more time with my family. I blogged about this period of my life from March 2009-May 2009. I was then trying to be as present as I could be to the miracles of my two children, then aged 2, and 6 months. The fact that I blogged every day no matter what speaks to a certain terror around the idea of taking a real rest. But I tried, and I do still feel really great about that period of time. I still find art projects around the house that we made together in that particular window. This song came from that experience.

Andrea's funeral was today. The Log Cabin was completely packed, SRO. I am terrible at ball-parking numbers, but it felt like a thousand of her friends and family gathered. The service lasted two hours, and we needed all two of those hours to hear from loved ones, and still I wanted more. She was such a dynamic, real, funny, passionate, optimistic, loving, brilliant person (read her obituary to learn more). I have known her since we were teenagers; our parents are friends. She was three years older than I, and when we ran into each other in the mid 90s when I was in the midst of my music career, she took my phone number and proceeded to invite me to her dinners, events, parties and friendship circles; taking care, I thought, of her old family friend. Like me, she lived life fully. Unlike me, she seemed to have time to breathe. I at times, forget how, or at least that is what I can tell myself.

It has been said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I don't know about that, but I can say for sure that perfection is my own personal enemy. After seeing The Tree of Life, I was left with this searing fear that I was wasting my time doing anything other than following my two children wherever they go, soaking up their every comment, their every gorgeously long eyelash, their every chuckle and screech. I won't tell you why so as not to act as a spoiler, but suffice it to say, life is brief, and the events of the past couple of weeks have hammered home to me that we don't get to know just how brief. This is a familiar fear of mine: I am missing it! I am going to be like the Dad in The Cat's In the Cradle, that old Harry Chapin song. Woe is me! Attend, earthling, attend!

Andrea suffered greatly from Lyme Disease, and one of the other things that's been on my mind much is climate change. Lyme Disease, which has also robbed much from my beloved aunt (who's had the disease for at least 22 years), is a direct result of changing climates, changing eco-systems and the rise of creepy horrible illnesses that leave doctors so baffled that some of them prefer to tell their patients that their symptoms must be all in their heads rather than admit they are stumped.

We don't know how much time we have. We don't know how present we get to be for the time we have either. And we don't ever really know another person's struggles. I should know by now never to judge my insides against someone else's outsides. (And Harry Chapin died before his kid grew up.)

"Go and live your lives fully," said the minister at the end of the service today. "Andrea wants us to do no less." And we did so, pouring out into the mountain top overlooking the valley where so many of us live and breathe every day. But we lingered, grabbing the hula hoops Andrea's family had placed out there in her honor and trying to make them fly around our middle-aged middles. We held each other warmly, wept and shared kleenex packs, marveled at how the kids are growing.

"Rest," Andrea's mother told me when I found her to say good-bye. "Andrea would have wanted you to rest and not work so hard."

And somewhere in the middle of these two heavenly directives, I live every single day. One of the gifts Andrea left me, a gift she seems to whisper to me as I go about my everyday tasks-- chopping the carrots, ordering the kids' summer pajamas, calling a friend--is the knowledge that we're all at any given time doing the best we can. And at any given time, our best might look radically different. One day my best might be crossing every last item off my to do list, even the one that says, "publish novel as e-book" and "set up non-profit in Holyoke," and another day it might be taking the compost jar to the pile in the backyard. Or maybe my best might just be managing one smile for my husband. But what freedom it would be to trust that. What freedom it would be to believe our friends are trusting that about us--our deep insides as well as our carefully managed appearances. I am breathing. I am living fully. I am resting. I have given much, and I have received much more. Thank you.

I have a friend who says
The earth cannot afford us
We have to grow up and not expect her to support us
We could give her something back.

I have a friend who has
A view of the Hudson River
He works all week just to enjoy his little sliver of view
Sometimes he forgets to look

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends...
What’s a little trouble between friends?

I have a friend who’s scared her man is going to leave her
She’s reading books in bed like she’s got some kind of fever
To cure their marriage woes
He reaches for her and she gives him the cold shoulder
In just a minute she will think to let him hold her
But the minute comes and goes.

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends

What’s a little trouble between friends?

I have a friend who has a job that doesn‘t pay her
She hates the paycheck but she loves the way it saves her
To do it her own way
She has a field of time to play with her son and daughter
She chops her firewood and they help her carry water
They live all day.

Everybody’s banking on a world that never ends
Can’t you see I’m always working hard to make amends

What’s a little trouble between friends?

Nerissa Nields
March 14, 2009

Antidote to Pain

I am journaling for Lent with a friend of mine who is a minister and a mom. We are using as inspiration a book called 40 Days with Kathleen Norris. Norris, a poet and a Benedictine oblate, is deeply in love with words, and never fails to open something in me with the daily reading. On day 36, KN writes, “ To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery. Our goal will be to recover our original freedom, our childlike (but never childish) self-consciousness (here the discipline of writing can help us)…We will need a powerful catalyst.”

The prompt today is “the antidote to pain.” Well, my per-usual antidote to pain is to nail everything to the ground. So much for mystery and ambiguity. I am not generally a fan. I am literal minded when it comes to my little kingdom, though I celebrate the mystery in my own songs and writings. Maybe that’s the way most artists are: in order to make a living as a creative, one really does need to grow up and learn the nuts and bolts of adulthood, such as balancing one’s checking account and trying to make a spending plan based on an income that in the best of times fluctuates. Because I am a creature whose head has perennially been in the clouds I have found it necessary to anchor my reality firmly in practices that keep me grounded. (If I had a nickel for every time a teacher sharply rapped on my blank windows and said, “Nerissa! Stop daydreaming,” I wouldn’t be writing about money at all). To this end, I meditate, journal, do one single daily sun salutation, run for 20 minutes, keep meticulous records of my earning and spending, practice my guitar, and keep in daily or at least weekly touch with my nearest and dearest. If I don’t do these things, I become unmoored. Perhaps these practices are my powerful catalysts.

Yesterday, at the last minute, someone dropped out of the writing retreat that would start that evening. It was nothing personal—in was a situation out of the participant's control, and it was clearly a loss for that person. But my reaction to his not being able to attend was over the top. First I fumed at his circumstances, then at God, and when the fuming burned itself out, I was left with a heavy grief in the shape of an old empty (but still weighty) burlap sack. And I could not drop it. There is a term in 12 step recovery called “self-seeking” and recovering addicts are cautioned to avoid self-seeking motives every single day. The trouble is, no one I know really can define self-seeking. It’s kind of like selfishness, and it’s kind of like ego-building, but opinions vary about what the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, really meant when he wrote the term.

Yesterday, I was carrying my heavy burlap sack home with me from the co-op after getting some last minute ingredients for my caramelized red pepper and onion gruyere quiche that I planned to serve that night. I made some calls to friends who would understand, but no one was there. So I prayed. “God, take this away. Have my sack. Or if you won’t take it, fill it with something better than my hurt pride and needless anxiety. Also, I get that I am doing that thing again: trying to know that I am OK based on how much other people love me. This is an old one. I want to get my self-worth from my own heart and from your sun shining on me. Not from applause and attention. But I feel like I am knocking on your door and you won’t let me in.”

At that moment, I was driving up the street that runs perpendicular to my daughter’s school. I had a moment of wishing she were in my arms the way she had been as a baby. And just then, the door burst open, and her Kindergarten class came tumbling out, and right in the middle, my daughter in her royal blue parka and hot pink gloves. The kids tore over to the playground, shouting and running and climbing. I pulled over and parked illegally, ran over to the gate. The teacher said, “Lila, your mother’s here,” but before Lila could even look up, I scooped her into my arms. “Mommy,” she said softly, snuggling her head into my chest. A moment later, she broke away, dancing off into the playground. She skipped about in circles singing, “Ring around the Rosey, Mommy Mommy Lovey!” and held up her two hands, making the sign for “I love you” like Mohammed Ali in When We Were Kings as he trained for the big fight. She came running back to hug me again.

I get what self-seeking is. It’s seeking the self outside of the self, and all the ways we do this. It’s thinking it’s in a pair of Frye boots (and the outfit that will suddenly make everyone finally understand who you really are.) It’s going out for dinner. It’s an A on a thesis. It’s the fifth drink. It’s finding Ms. Right. It’s your best friend telling you your stomach doesn’t stick out. It’s your sister telling you her son was just as impossible as yours when he was the same age. It’s the radio station playing your CD. It’s even standing up and singing the beloved hymn in church. It’s all manner of good and not so good and downright harmful ways of engagement, and I will—we all will—continue to seek them and do them for the rest of our lives. I don’t see a cure. But I do see the problem, and I do see a solution. The solution is, as usual, kindness, humor, time, and most of all, being awake. The solution is also bowing to the mystery. Reveling in the ambiguity. Doing our little disciplines, because indeed these are our offerings to God, these are the containers in which we put our kindness, humor, time and attention, but we need to hold them lightly, make our containers out of breakable clay instead of cast iron.

My only real job is to be Nerissa. To be her, to celebrate her gifts and to respect her limits. To listen to the quiet voice in her heart whose voice can only be heard when she is still and silent and seeking. I think this is the true antidote to pain.

Back at the Fruit Tree

Phillip Price of the Winterpills (and formally of the Maggies) once said to me that every time he got an idea for a song he wrote five different versions of it. That blew me away. I am way more parsimonious than he, or maybe just lazy. I try to cram every single idea I am having at the present moment into one song, "I Am the Walrus"-style. John Lennon famously wrote his songs as one would make a patchwork quilt: scraps of ideas and riffs and even takes in totally different keys (see "Strawberry Fields Forever). That was good enough for me. Although if I think I didn't nail the idea, then I might try try again. For example, in 1995 I fell in love with the Steely Dan song "Hey Nineteen" (which had been on the charts the week Lennon was killed, but I hated SD at the time and only resented them taking airplay away from John and the Beatles at the time). Later, in my mid twenties, I listened to that song, drinking red wine and letting both swirl around in my mouth. (Even now as I write this I am swooning: "The Cuervo Gold/The fine Columbian/Make tonight a wonderful thing." Though without the influence of the red wine, a bit...ick.) And I thought, "I'd like to write this song from the point of view of the 19 year old."

So I wrote "Fountain of Youth." It was OK, but it didn't grab me in the backs of the knees the way "Hey Nienteen" did. And so one sunny March morning, I sat down on the rug in the living room with a huge cup of coffee, several notebooks and my guitar. I scribbled furiously until I'd written down every single Idea I had about the song I wanted to write. And then I played a riff I'd made up during soundcheck at the gig the weekend before, and out came "Best Black Dress."

Fast forward fourteen years. I'd written "The Full Catastrophe" at Katryna's request, and then had the summer to ignore it. It was October and we had a show coming up at the Iron Horse. I wanted to debut a new song, and it should probably have been The Full Cat, but something was bugging me about the song. It was too sincere and straightforward. It did not speak to the enormity of the existential pain I was feeling at the moment. The pain felt like this: I was overwhelmed. I just looked up where "overwhelm" comes from, specifically what "whelm" means: to cover. That's exactly how I felt. Covered over. Parenthood is literally overwhelming. We cover over ourselves sometimes (many times) on purpose in order to get the job done. We cover over our basic needs (to sleep, eat in a calm manner, have sex with our partners) to attend to our little ones. And we cover over our more esoteric needs (to go for a bike ride in early spring; to write a song on the living room floor, to spend an afternoon wandering from coffeeshop to bookstore to our neighbor's kitchen table) because there just isn't that kind of time.

And we are overwhelmed--egos covered over, self-interest covered over, ambition covered over--with love for our darlings. That very first look into my babies' faces did me in. I was willing to do anything, go to any lengths to provide and protect for those squirmy, red, pooping cutie pies.

But 'overwhelmed' does not mean 'annihilated'. We're still there, as is the carpet, under that cover of legos, bad kids' books, contents of a drawer of clothes and stuffed animals. We're still conscious and waiting, a part of us full of compassion for our spouse or partner who is equally overwhelmed while the other part is keeping meticulous track of exactly how unequal the duties are being handled, and exactly how many hours "off" s/he has had in the last 4 years.

For me, so much of my journey was in learning to metabolize my own disappointment in myself, in my shockingly low capacity for creative play with my kids, for my quick temper, for my pathetically small reserves of patience. I was so not the mother I'd hoped I'd be, and yet, when I killed that angel in the house, I was left with someone who was really not so bad. And most importantly, I was left with someone who even with a mouth full of the ashes of disappointment was willing to get up every day and meet her beloved(s) back at the fruit tree.

And so I wrote two more songs about the Full Catastrophe idea. One was More Than Enough. The other was this one:

Back at the Fruit Tree

Still the camera on the moment I met you
All the world inside a garden built for two
All the fruit you could eat in a day
All the news turned into boats
That float on down the river

Ah, ahhhh…..

But someone has to cut the brambles back
Someone has to stave the weeds’ attack
Someone has to bring the harvest in
Someone has to gather seeds to hold us through the winter….

I don’t need the good life
I just need life
The full catastrophe
If you’ll see me that way
With my feet covered in clay
I’ll meet you back at the fruit tree.

The mind beats like the tides in a lake that thinks it’s the sea
But only storms create conditions for epiphany
October gardens rusty, ragged, overgrown
The child won’t be consoled and you
Don’t want to be alone.
You find a seat at the edge of the bed
Put a hand on a hot and sticky head
You say, “So, tell me all about your day
No matter what it is, I’ll stay. I won’t go away.

I don’t need the good life
I just need life
The full catastrophe
If you’ll see me that way
With my feet covered in clay
I’ll meet you back at the fruit tree.

Nerissa Nields
Oct. 22, 2009

Ten Year Tin

This is the first in a series of posts about the songs on our new CD The Full Catastrophe which is due out on April 1 2012. Today, Dave Chalfant did what may well be the final mixes of the last song. As I write this, Katryna is making a valentine for our fans: a video for Ten Year Tin, which is a song about marriage. Here are the lyrics and video.

Ten Year Tin
Fill me up
Till I’m overflowing
Fill me up
Till I can’t take anymore
Fill me up
Everything is growing
In the garden, in the bedroom
In and out our front door
Wake me up
On our 10 year anniversary
We’ll save up
And take a trip across the sea
We’ll leave the kids with someone vaguely competent
Bon voyage, it’ll be just you and me
I want to swear like a sailor in the storm
I want to stare down the forces of the wind
I want to make love on deck and watch the moon across the sky
I want to put all our pennies in our ten-year tin.

[I see you
I see the man I married
I see you
I see the noble and the beast
And I see the way you treat the one who is serving you
With tenderness and humor, always last but not least] {we cut this verse for the CD}
Look at me
I can’t see my own face
Look at me
You see everything I am
And I’ve seen your worst, and babe, I’d have you anyway
Things do not always go according to our plans
I want to swear like a sailor in the storm
I want to stare down the forces of the wind
I want to make love on deck and watch the moon across the sky
I want to put all our pennies in our ten-year tin.

I want to storm, I want to swear
I want to make sure I get my fair share
I want peace--that's why I hide
I want to know that you're on my side.

Fight with me
I’m not afraid of fighting
Cause I see
That I am safe inside this ring
Fight with me
And I will welcome the battle
Even tell you I’m sorry when the storm is finally passing
I’ll be wrong again
I am wrong so often
Tell me when
You can’t take it any more
I’ll remind you that you took me for better
But when I am worse is what those blessed vows are for

I want to swear like a sailor in the storm
I want to stare down the forces of the wind
I want to make love on deck and watch the moon across the sky
I want to put all our pennies in our ten-year tin.


Nerissa and Katryna Nields
Feb. 2, 2010

History and Writing Process
Katryna called me up in Sept. 2009 when she and Dave were celebrating their 10th anniversary. "Kathy and Henry [Dave's parents] gave us a ten year tin!" Apparently "ten" is the tin anniversary.
"I think we should learn to play it! I think we should name our new CD Ten Year Tin! I think you should write a song called "Ten Year Tin"! And it should have this line:
"I want to swear like a sailor in the storm..." And she sang the line over the phone.

I wrote this song late in the game, relatively. We started recording the new CD in December 2009 and this song came in February 2010. By that time, we'd already done the basic tracks for many of the other songs, and we thought we were done, though in retrospect, we still hadn't written "Creek's Gonna Rise," "The Number One Reason That Parents Are Cranky Is Because They Didn't Get Enough Sleep," or "Your House Is Strong." But we were so giddy about having come up with this one that for a while we really did think we'd name the CD Ten Year Tin.

At first, it was missing its bridge. Dave said, "I think the song needs something. Some progression." Usually, I need to hide away to write something; I remember reading about how Dylan would compose whole sets of lyrics on the spot in the studio. I never thought I'd be able to do that, but for this song, I ducked into the recording booth, sat down with the guitar and wrote the middle eight, which is now my favorite part of the song. We performed "Ten Year Tin" at Falcon Ridge 2010 and then got our rhythm section (Lorne Entress on drums and Paul Kochanski on bass) to record live in Sackamusic studio a couple weeks later while the arrangement was fresh. As I recall, Lorne, who is a wonderful producer himself, helped us figure out the feel.

While this song is for Katryna and Dave in celebration of their amazing, inspiring marriage, I feel funny writing about Dave and Katryna--not being either of them--I will write about myself. I have been married twice. If you add up my married years, I have been married for over a third of my life. And once I celebrated a ten year tin, though we didn't know it, and it was tinnish in a not-good way. But this I know about marriage: it doesn't work to try not to have conflicts. Just as in skiing it's essential to learn to fall properly, in a committed relationship, it's essential to learn to fight fairly. Or if you don't like the word "fighting" then try "exercise ego dominance until you remember that doesn't work for the long term." In my first marriage, I was an excellent jouster. He and I would go at it, and I would best him with my court room logic. That did me no good whatsoever when the marriage fell apart and I was left sputtering at his back. You can win every battle and lose the war.

So I wanted to get at the idea that in a passionate relationship, there are going to be big waves. And in a healthy relationship, there is growth, sometimes an abundance of growth. And what I learned from my first marriage is this: if I wanted a relationship to last forever, I would have to invest in it every single day. This time around, I take nothing for granted.

Jesus

This morning the sky was striped, horizontally, gray and blue outside our new windows overlooking the back yard. I held a sleepy Jay, still nursing at 3, and balanced the feelings of this early, too early, thaw. Like everything in our culture, it is too easy to go jacketless in January.

For one of my new year's intentions, I foolishly told God I wanted the courage to share my faith more openly. Also that I wanted someone to come into my life to teach me with a bit more structure than what I've been getting. But first to the faith sharing.

1. I don't really want to share my faith. Believing in God is mostly not cool, unless you are Bono or Anne Lamott or Jesus. But way more to the point, believing in God can associate one with a certain kind of holy that smacks of know-it-allness. As I am a congenital know-it-all, this is really dangerous territory for me. But about God, there is one things I am sure of: I do not know it all. For example, I do not know that there is a God. But I do believe. Those are different things.

2. I don't want to argue with anyone, ever. I don't want to convince anyone else to believe. I don't think I am better than anyone. Opposite. As I have said previously, it is not the well who need a hospital but the sick. So it is with church.

3. I am not in any way shape or form allied with the Tea Party.

4. I think fundamentalism in any guise is fundamentally dangerous. OK--perhaps that is arguing. Sorry.

That said:

5. When I first heard about Jesus I fell madly in love with him. I was about four, and we were standing around my mother's piano at Christmas time. She was playing and singing "Away in the Manger" and I burst into tears because I loved the little lord Jesus and his sweet head so much; the tenderness overwhelmed me.

6. I prayed to God every night, but not on my knees. Just in my head, lying in bed. I asked God to keep everyone I knew alive, to have them not get divorced and wished that they would all be happy.

7. When John Lennon died, I imagined him on a desert island playing guitar and holding court. I would meditate and visit him there.

8. My parents attended a Presbyterian church that met in a farmhouse in Northern VA. The minister was kind, smart, full of struggles which he generously shared with us, rather than pretend to be perfect. He wore a white backwards collar and a goatee. He and his wife became my parents' best friends. When I was fourteen, he died of Hodgkins Lymphoma. A few months before he died, my father finally joined the church. During the service, my dad came off the dias to embrace the dying minister who struggled to his feet, stumbled and fell into my dad's arms. He was thin, young and heavily freckled from the chemotherapy. His hair was falling out. I thought he looked exactly like Jesus must have.

9. I started to pay attention at church. When my father stood up and said that the third teacher in a row had quit trying to teach the sixth graders, and that "Any one in this room is qualified to teach them," I thought to myself, "He said 'Anyone.' But I'm in this room, and I am not qualified." The following Sunday I was their teacher. I taught those kids for the next three years until I left for college.

10. My uncle Brian gave me a book of poetry and photographs by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. I read it one school night when I was supposed to be writing an American history paper. In the low lamplight of my room, next to my collection of Beatles and Stones LPs I felt something land in my heart with a gentle thud. I was supposed to be a minister.

11. I told everyone. It was an unusual career choice, and I figured I'd only have to work Sundays. Perfect for raising a family, and way safer and easier than trying to be the Beatles.

12. I was in Campus Crusade for Christ for about six weeks after I broke up with the boy I had been dating for four and a half years. This was the first time I ever heard this equation: Adam sinned by disobeying God; therefore humans had to die. God had no control over this, but somehow Jesus sacrificing himself redeemed mankind, or at least those who believe in him. I could not get my mind around it, nor the idea that my best friend who was Jewish was doomed and I wasn't. So I left Campus Crusade, but not Jesus. I went to an Episcopal church and began to write songs.

13. I married right out of college, a man who called himself a secular humanist, and I visited Yale Divinity School and had an interview. Everyone there, it seemed to me, was 42 and female. "So," I said. "I am going to try to do this music thing. When I am 42 I will come back."

14. I had a music career. Deep in the bowels of that career, I got very sick with an eating disorder. I would pray to God, asking for help, but the answer always came back, "Why would God care about your ridiculous obsession with your weight and food? Just stop it!" But I couldn't stop it any more than I could change the color of my eyes. And one day someone told me I had a disease that I was powerless over. Someone suggested that God really might care that I was hurting myself. And I noticed that I was unable to sit still with myself. I could not sit and breath in and out without a surge of hammering thoughts, a kind of deafening pounding of my own heart. People suggested I meditate but that was as crazy an idea as would be telling me to fly. And I could not stop the compulsive behaviors. One night when I fell asleep in despair. I knew I had too much pride to ask for help, to admit that I was different from other people, to admit that as a thirty year old seemingly successful woman, I was incapable of caring for myself in this fundamental way. I could not feed myself. I went to bed utterly defeated. I woke up with this strange, calm willingness. There was a steady quiet voice inside that said, "I am here now. I will take care of you." And from that day forward, with a lot of help from my friends, I never hurt myself with food or lack of food again. The obsession and the compulsion were lifted. I was free.

15. I read everything I could. I had this Presence, and It did care about every aspect of my life, or at least It listened. I read Thich Nhat Hanh, more Henri Nouwen, Marcus Borg, Pema Chodron, Ram Dass, the Bhaghavad Gita, Jack Kornfield, Thomas Merton, Stephen Mitchell, Byron Katie, Eckhardt Tolle, the Bible, Elaine Pagels, and much twelve step literature. I made the twelve steps my path and slowly, a day at a time, my thinking changed. I became different. And I was the same. But in a lot less pain.

16. My marriage fell apart--too much God, he said. I was terrified, but on the first night alone in my house, I felt that Presence again. I lived well as a single woman. I followed the next breadcrumb. I met the guy I was always afraid I would meet--the one for whom I'd have to leave my first husband, or else suffer silently for the rest of my life. We found a church where the minister was a poet and a shepherd and not ordained. We pitched our tent. We got married there, baptized our daughter and then our son.

17. Being a mother proved to be the undoing of any pretense that I was holy. Every stitch of spiritual education was used until it frayed. I prayed on my knees to not yell at my kids, and by seven am I would have broken my resolution. But when I could remember to ask Jesus to show up, i became at least aware of my failings, if not able to act like the grown-up in the room. Sooner or later, I would apologize and the domestic tangles would unravel. I know how to apologize now. I can't live with my own half-turned shoulder for more than a day anymore. So I face front, heart forward. My children are my best spiritual teachers, by far. But recently I have yearned for a more orthodox teacher who can diagram sentences and answer my questions with experience rather than the koan-ic mutterings of my wee gurus.

So a few days after January first, right on schedule, I guess, one of our town's most beloved ministers, the retired pastor of the church where I found 12 step recovery, nabbed me. "It's time for you and me to talk about you going to seminary," he said. (How did he know that every few years I order the course catalogs from Harvard and Yale? Did someone tell on me?) "Do you have time to have lunch with me and another new minister?"

Of course I did. And so we are beginning a process called Discernment, to see if and when I will go on to the ministry. I don't know if it will be ten years or twenty years. I love my life right now, and I have a lot more music to make, a lot more retreats to run, a lot more HootenNannies to teach,and most importantly, a couple of small kids who need me near and close--body and soul. But I have comrades on the journey now, and it does feel as though I am on my way back home.

Dreaming of the Dead

(My grandmother)

Last night I had a dream about my grandfather, a man who died in 1981 at the age of 66 from esophageal cancer. When he died, I was thirteen, and I had just discovered him. For most of the overlap of our lives, he was grouchy and clearly regarded his three granddaughters as a noisy nuisance at best and competition for his wife's attention at worst. He regularly yelled at her, and occasionally at us, so we hid from him, spying on him from behind open doors. He was mostly deaf and completely so when he didn't wear his hearing aid. He had a bad back, and I'd watch him stretch it when he thought he was alone. It made me feel strange to see him looking so vulnerable, back against the wall, lifting his arms like the Romper Room lady, wearing funny long white underwear.

He was a fire-breathing monster before his first drink. He yelled at my grandmother in public if dinner wasn't on the table by 6:30. We never ate before seven. Also, my grandmother didn't actually cook the dinner. So I am not sure what that was all about, but at any rate, I was afraid of him, and so were many people.

For Christmas 1977, after years of letting my grandmother handle the gifts to the grandkids, he gave me a stereo--a real stereo, with high quality hi-fi speakers, a synthesizer and a turn table. It was the best present I ever got, and that system followed me to college and to my first apartment, or pieces of it did anyway. He loved listening to music more than anything in the world; he worshiped at the church of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, filling the house with music played so loudly the house shook--remember, he was deaf. The next year, he gave me a Swiss Army Knife with every attachment imaginable. I felt seen. The last summer he was alive, I came to stay with him and my grandmother for a week in the summer. In the still-sunny evenings, he'd drink his soup--the only thing he could eat anymore since his tracheotomy--and ask me what I was reading. When I told him I loved Agatha Christie novels he smiled conspiratorially. "But just the Hercule Poirot ones, right?" And I fell in love with him.

His children deny his alcoholism. But my sister said to one of them, long after he had died, "But they had to pour whiskey into the feeding hole in his stomach every day. I think that means the doctors understood that he was an alcoholic."

Today I joined the Y. I should say "rejoined" since we are foul-weather members, always quitting in late May. Tom and I thought long and hard about joining. We don't know how much we'll really use it since we both prefer to run, walk, bike and do outdoor activities over indoor ones. I have a fabulous yoga studio, so I don't intend to bring my danurasanas there, either. But the kids love it. They need a place to swim and to learn to swim. Everyone I know is a member. And I want a Y two blocks from my house, so I see our membership as neighborly support in part.

I also saw that they have a class at 4:15 called Family Yoga. I have been fantasizing about bringing my kids to a family yoga class since before Elle was born. It's never worked out timing-wise. But today, I saw it would--I am officially looking for something to do with the kids during what is in our family lo-o-o-ong witching hours of after-school to dinnertime.

We started out eagerly enough, each of us choosing a different colored yoga mat from the closet. We set our mats up in a row, with mama in the middle. Elle was terrific, able to do every pose. Jay was predictably hilarious, sitting in half lotus, jumping around on a one-footed tree, inventing something that looked like table pose with one leg up in the air, perpendicular to the floor. Eventually all that devolved to the kids running around the room. I was told that this is usual for this class. The whole thing was a half hour. I was in heaven.

And then we stepped out of the class to put on socks, shoes, winter coats, scarves, hats--all in triplicate. And it was as if I had scalded them with hot water. "That was too short," Elle whined.
"Oh, I am so glad you liked it!" I said. "I wish it were longer too."
"Not longer, Mama! I hated it! We didn't get to run around enough. I wanted to go swimming." And she threw herself down in the middle of the hallway sobbing. Meanwhile, Jay screamed at me when I tried to put his socks on him. "Why do you DO dat, Mama? You are SO MEAN TO ME!!!" And he ran away down the hall.

As I write it now, it's pretty funny. But in the moment, all I could think about was my disappointment that my fantasy about family yoga was going up in smoke; and also that the class that had just started in the yoga room was listening, eyes closed, wishing for a peaceful pre-OM silence, to the sounds of kids berating the World's Worst Mother. So I acted like one. "I'm leaving," I announced. "See you in the parking lot." And I marched off, their coats and hats and shoes in my hand. The kids followed me screaming, "Why are you so mean, Mama! You are being SO MEAN!"


In my dream, someone said, "Granddad has come back." And I saw him first in a wheelchair, many years older, bald and round, lost-looking. But then he stood up and was transformed. He rose to a towering height, and shone like an angel. Perhaps he was one. He was the most handsome version of himself. His hair was silver and gold, and his skin shone gold, too. His eyes were clear and peaceful and kind. I came to him and put my ear to his chest. He held me for a long time. I pulled away and looked up at him. I didn't know what to say. I needed to say something--because I thought he was dead. So I finally looked him in the eye and said, "Should I be worried about you?"

He took a breath. "Well, I am abstinent," he said. "So no. But I haven't beaten cancer yet."

"You will," I told him.

I woke with the sweetest feeling about him. Even now, writing about it, I have tears in my eyes. My friend Judy, an author who writes in my Wednesday group, recently said, "When we dream of dead people, these are not really dreams." Of course, I see myself in this dream, in a very dream-like way, so I don't know. But I also feel as though I had the most wonderful visit/visitation imaginable.

I told the kids on the car ride home that I was sad we had joined the Y because of how terribly they had behaved.
"We didn't behave terribly, Mama. YOU behaved terribly."
I thought about this. They were right.
"That's true," I said. "But it doesn't solve the problem. I think we all need to just take a big break from each other between pick up from school and dinner time. We're all too cranky."
"I'm not cranky!" screamed Elle. "You're cranky! I want Dada!" And she collapsed again on the floor sobbing.

I gave up. I started to make dinner, pulling food out of the fridge with one hand, texting Tom with my other. "Please do not go to the store. Just come home now."
He texted back: "Need to not come home. Need time to myself. Need to come home after you feed the kids dinner." It was a conspiracy. He was going to leave me with them, me whom they hated. Possibly they would have killed me by the time they got home. No, that wasn't realistic. They wouldn't have killed me, but they would probably steal away in the middle of the night to marry men from the motor trade like the girl in "She's Leaving Home."

I started to pray. Help, help, help, like that.

At that moment the phone rang. It was my father. I took the phone into the bathroom, burst into tears and told him briefly about the bad afternoon and then about the dream about my grandfather, his father. As I sobbed, Jay came in and threw his arms around my legs, patting the backs of them consolingly.

"That's wonderful," said my father. "You're lucky to have had that dream."

"Daddy's home!"shrieked Elle, and sure enough, in came Tom to the scene of chaos, me with a tear stained face and the kids attached to my legs, my father under my ear. And I knew we'd all be ok for the foreseeable future.

My grandfather believed in God. I didn't see this myself, and when I learned as a teenager that he was the believer and my saintly grandmother was the atheist, it threw my straight Protestant concepts for a loop. But now I get it. Saintly people don't need God, they don't need church. It's those of us who wrestle with our rage, who look for Spirit in a bottle, who fall down again and again in our relationships, and who are saved by saying we are sorry--we're the ones who need church, just as the sick are the ones who need a hospital. And on good days, we are the ones who see angels.

Photo Shoot for The Full Catastrophe

Last week, Katryna and I had to do a photo shoot for our new CD, The Full Catastrophe, which against all odds is finally looking like it will be finished. We started making this CD in December. December 2009. There are songs on it that I wrote in the Bush administration. Since starting production, my kids have graduated from schools, become potty trained and verbal, learned to ride a two-wheel bike and one of them can now play violin better than I can play guitar.

I hate photo shoots more than almost any other aspect of my job--even more than traveling, even more than playing to a room where we almost outnumber the audience. I hate photo shoots because I feel fake, holding a smile when I am wondering if I am going to have that look in this shot: the one where I look like someone next to me just announced that Democrats should be put in jail for making consumers buy compact fluorescent bulbs--but quick! Smile, because this is the picture we're going to mail to cheer up someone's sick grandma for Christmas in Seattle! I hate standing around. I hate the part where Katryna thinks of something clever, which translates to me looking foolish.

And recently, there's been another wrinkle. That is, wrinkles.

Present at this photo shoot were photographer Kris, our manager Patty, our friend Liz and another Patty who is a hair stylist and beautician. Kris kept saying, "Neriss, it is not torture!" Patty #2 kept saying, "Nerissa, relax your brow! When you're tense, all your wrinkles show!"

"I am relaxing!" I'd shout. "This is as unwrinkled as I get!"

And I'd demonstrate. In order to unwrinkle my brow, I had to lower my eyelids so dramatically that I looked like that blue dog in "Huckleberry Hound" who rode the elevator and said, "Going down, sir?"

I seriously wondered if I should have gotten botox for the shoot.

Our one-time manager Dennis Oppenheimer told us never ever ever, no matter what, to tell our ages. He said, "Just say you're in your twenties. And when you turn thirty, just keep saying you're in your twenties." We followed his advice until we turned thirty. Then we told everyone when our birthdays were and enjoyed the cards and presents.

I have always felt proud of my age, owning it and naming it. I like the way I am aging, mostly. Until I have to have a photo shoot.

This CD is so long in the making, so tenuous in its existence in my mind, that I've kind of let go of all expectations of how it's going to be received. The whole album is about parenthood, marriage and the challenges of staying present to the gifts of these most precious relationships, the challenge of losing oneself in one's beloveds. So of course it is ironic and natural that our husbands and children and the life we have made for ourselves over the past two plus years are the very reasons we have not been able to just put our noses to the grindstone and get the thing out there. We had one day a week--sometimes--to show up in the recording studio, and on these days we really only had from about 11am-2pm. Three hours before we had to go pick up our kids from school.

Anyway, something funny happened on the way to this photo shoot. I actually had fun. First I had fun with Katryna thinking of the image we wanted: a sort of Hopper-esque shot of us sitting on a couple of chairs linked together in the middle of a laundromat, us dressed in finery as if we were going to a ball, but instead surrounded by laundry with one of us checking her iPhone. I saw the image clearly--a blue-green background with stunning overlit shots of us looking gorgeous and washed out, our faces so overlit that all you can see are our shocked features and fancy hairdos. It would be funny and beautiful all at the same time.
THIS IS NOT THAT SHOT!

It wasn't possible to get that shot because
1. We didn't have the lighting. Instead Liz held up a big gold hula hoop with gold foil stretched over it to shine the lights our friend Jennifer lent us into our faces. But washed out it did not make us.
2. The room was not bluegreen but beige and black and truly ugly, not jolie-laide as I'd imagined. 3. We really looked like women in their mid-forties dressed up to go to a party and not hipster twentysomethings who resembled Delores O'Riorden. I can't get away from the fact that we were born in the late 60s and that we're now in the two thousand teens.

The photo shoot was fun after all. We laughed. We focused. When we saw that our initial vision wasn't going to work, we punted. Our amazing friend and photographer Kris took shots of us in the reflection of the dryer windows. Afterwards we all went out to dinner at one of those little restaurants tucked away, and we tucked ourselves away in the far back corner. All that glamour had made us hungry.

October Snowstorm

It's one of the many paradoxes of life that by the time we really become convinced that we want to--need to--change, it's too late. Not to be a downer; but I couldn't help but think this way during the aftermath of Halloween weekend. A freak snow storm caused massive power outages and caused me to wish my species hadn't wrecked the planet, and also that I had solar panels, a generator and a CO2 friendly wood stove.

Like so many in New England, we awoke the morning of Oct. 30 to a cold house on a brilliantly beautiful day. We'd watched the kids catching snowflakes with their tongues the afternoon before, and at the time, the snow seemed benign, albeit unseasonal.

Fun! A snowstorm in October! And our new gas stove worked, at least the burners did, so tea (caffeine) was had by the grown ups in the house, which meant all was well. We'd signed up to run in a Halloween 5K, so we bundled up and drove downtown after enjoying a warm microwave-less breakfast. So far so good.



But Northampton was dark, even at 10am. The traffic lights were out and the big clock downtown was black. The roads were flooded with dirty snow, and the parking lot where the race was supposed to start was empty. Our cell phones only kind of worked. Not to be deterred completely, we parked and got out the double jogging stroller and pushed it through the slush, thinking we'd get some warm beverages at a coffee shop. But nothing was open. Tom turned back with the kids, and I jogged toward home, trying to get some intel on the ground, passing by my friend Margaret's house to see if her party was still happening that night. I found her and her husband shoveling out their driveway. She is a major activist for climate change; yesterday she joined a group of protesters who circled the White House to protest the TransCanada pipeline--she's serious. It seemed so ironic that her party would be cancelled by a freakish climate-change-induced snowstorm. She was the very person I wanted to be with that day, so I was glad at least that I got to give her a hug and wish her good luck.


I came across my friends Liz and Kris digging out Liz's driveway and learned from them how serious the damage was, that we might be in the cold and dark for days, even weeks. I invited them over for lunch, since I had burners, after all--one does want to share when one finds oneself in a situation like this. As I walked home, my mind kept leaping to fearful conclusions. Weeks! Dark! Cold! WEEKS! Kids not in school! COLD! But I kept reminding it that right now, I was just jogging in the snow. Right now, I had hot water and gas burners. Right now, I had a cell phone that sometimes worked. And soon I had a text from my sister in Conway saying she had heat and power, and to come on up for the night.

So we did; we packed as if we were going to be gone for a week. We took all the food in our fridge and freezer and all our computers and iPads and cell phones and favorite stuffed animals and decamped. Katryna made pizza, Kris cuddled my kids, the kids thought they'd died and gone to heaven, and later Dave Hower's family joined us. We were warm and snug, having a mini Nields reunion. The next morning, with Patty joining us from cold/dark Easthampton, the adults had five computers going around the dining room table, each of us checking FaceBook obsessively, and occasionally communicating with each other via FaceBook instead of across the table, and also barking at the kids to turn off their screens.


Our power, we soon learned from FaceBook friends/neighbors, came on about 10am and we left Conway in the early afternoon to go home and dress up for the Halloween that was officially canceled. Elle was a Ghost/Pirate/Unicorn/Vampire, and Jay was a Kirby Car driver (AKA Herbie the Love Bug--see photos below). I was Janis Joplin and Tom was a Garden Variety Victim (Tom's costume every year is some variation on a particular American flag bandana and fake blood). We set out bravely but as soon as we rounded the corner, we saw why the town had canceled Halloween. Downed trees and power lines made sidewalk travel impossible and impassible, and so we put Kirby in the back of Tom's truck and visited exactly two houses.




The aftermath has been harder than the actual storm. There is a reason it's not supposed to snow on Halloween. Our trees still have most of their leaves, so when the snow fell (18 inches, 27 inches, three feet in some parts), the canopy couldn't hold it, but couldn't drop it either. So the branches bent, and the branches broke. The sight of all these broken trees is more and more disturbing to me with the passing days; the limbs will never grow back. Great beauties all over town are torn beyond recognition. I have this fear that with each bizarre storm we will lose more parts of the trees until eventually we'll just have shards and stumps. I keep hearing stories about trees crashing into houses, into bedroom windows where moms were reading to their kids, into metal roofs like huge accusing fingers. Walking home on the bike trail a few days ago, I saw downed trees with their branches fingering the earth, reminding me of the yoga pose vasistasana. No one holds a yoga pose for long. We are putting too much stress on our trees, asking too much of them. They didn't sign up for this climate.



Even as I fret about our trees, I am contemplating getting a wood stove. At least then I could put all the broken limbs to some use (to me.) But with Jay's asthma, it might not be a good thing. Not to mention the carbon we'd be putting in the air--which is why we have this freak October snow storm to begin with.

How do we consume less? How do we change our ways? Even if it is too late, I want to change, partly out of penance, and partly out of respect. So I pulled my neglected bike out of the barn and have been riding it. Today I took Jay to school, with him crowded into the baby seat in the back. He loved it. "Oh, wook at dose twees, Mama," I heard him say from his perch behind me. "Dey fell down." I dropped him off at school only to find that it was once again Halloween (we've had many make-up Halloweens), and so I handed the teacher his bike helmet and told her to cover it with aluminum foil so he could reprise his role as Kirby Car driver, this time sans vehicle. And then I biked off, meandering around our neighborhood to see how folks were doing. We all seem a lot closer now, more necessarily connected. And I have a feeling it's going to become more that way in the future.

Readers: What were your experiences in the storm? What can we do to put fewer fossil fuels into the air, use less? Should we invest in solar panels? Generators? Wood stoves? Where do you see glimmers of hope in the climate battle?