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.

When the Sun Gets Sick

The ground has softened and so have our hearts
The cry went out, and we have responded—a domestic tsunami, you might say.

Somehow all the crocuses knew it was time to come up,
Even with the peach fuzz of snow on their beards.

I was told yesterday that after exerting yourself for ten minutes
You could no longer raise your hand to lift a glass of water to your lips.
You who couldn’t stay off the ice last December,
Shooting goals past the fifteen year old boys
I see you on the fields when you were fifteen
Hammering the ball neatly into the net
Dashing across the grass on long colt legs.
Dazzling us with your smile so bright
Many had to turn away. So much goodness in one girl.

We are promised a new happiness.
The Zen master says we need to let go of the raft
Once we've crossed the river.
Easier said than done.
I say it all the time, but I don't do it.
The crocus does it every year, but it doesn't say it.

Someone else told me yesterday that while we still wage wars
We have lost our stomach for them.
They dribble out after the first savage spring
We’ve lost our heart for finishing, for hammering them into the net.

Small hope, but hope nonetheless.
Even so, as for you, as for me—I’m betting on the crocus.

-Nerissa Nields
April 5, 2011

I wrote this poem a year ago when I heard that my friend Andrea was ill. Later, she discovered she had late stage Lyme Disease. She battled bravely for over a year and died on April 6, 2012. I will miss her forever.

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

Perfect

I am going to take a break from my assignment of writing on the writing/recording process of each of the 13 songs on The Full Catastrophe (our 16th CD, due out April 10, 2012) to write about peace and love. "Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," said Jesus. (Matt. 5:48) Though that oppressive word might better be translated as "whole," "complete," or my current favorite, "mature." But as this passage comes in the context of Jesus talking about loving our enemies ("If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?" Matt 5:46), I'm thinking he's not really that interested in the 4.0 kind of perfect. That kind of perfect is way easier than the kind of maturity that's called for these days.

It's late March. We just lived through a thoroughly delightful heat wave, where records were broken all over the country--where the daily lows were seasonal record breakers, for that matter. Sweet as it was to go jogging in a tank top, it was hard to fully enjoy it when, after googling "Climate Change New England" I got this, from that radical web site "New England Aquarium." In the hopes of not losing you right now, I will stop talking about natural (man-made) disasters and instead place an asterisk here* and you can follow it down if you want to read the most disturbing of the forecast.

Somehow, no one really wanted to stand around worrying with me last week when I expressed my ambivalence about the warm spell. Was I really going to look the carpe diem gift horse in the mouth? Anyway, it's basically my religion to try to figure out why today's bad news might be good news sometime in the future; if, that is , we can be fully present to what is going on, inside our bodies and outside, honestly naming what it is. And so that is what I did last week. I sat a lot with my eyes soft like what my friend's four-year-old calls a "prey animal" and tried not to go on the attack. I listened a lot to the Beatles with my son. Another of the tenants of my religion is that if you, like the Beatles, keep hammering the themes of Peace and Love you can't go too far wrong.

This got harder the day we flew home from Florida and read about Trayvon Martin. Living as I do in Northampton MA, I never cease to be amazed at how different the rest of the country is. When I read some of the thoughts about the case--about how this is proof that multiculturalism doesn't work, about how "blacks only care when it's one of their own," I just want to sit with my head in my hands and cry for the rest of my life. I think about my friends and neighbors, parents of African American children, and how they tell me at a certain age they have to sit their sons down and give them The Talk ("No, it's not fair. But when you see a cop, do not ever ever give him lip. When you walk in a white neighborhood, do not attract attention. Do not behave like a teenager, even if your white buddy is.") I think about my own kids, being in the right place (their own neighborhood) at the right time (when is it not the right time to be getting some fresh air?) with some paranoid with a gun trailing them. Only it wouldn't happen to my kids in that same way. And at some point I am going to have to have a different kind of The Talk with my kids, letting them know that they are privileged beyond measure, and that what they do with that privilege is up to them.

Peace and love, huh? I want to rail and scream and physically harm racists and Rush Limbaugh dittoheads. Other than that, my quiet time, sitting with my eyes closed as I pretend to be a prey animal, is going just fine. And just as I recognized during 911 that our rage at the attackers was going to spiral into something far worse, I can (barely) see now that getting angry on top of the hateful shooting and dispiriting injustice is going to make matters worse, unless the anger can be channeled into some more skillful energy. On Saturday night, Katryna and I sang "Black Boys on Mopeds" to our audience at the Common Ground in Hasting-on-Hudson. That's what we do--we sing. Another tenant of my religion is that people singing together can change and has changed the world.

In much better news, Anne Lamott has a new book out. Pam Houston has a new book out. Regardless of the thermometer, the sun is returning, a few more minutes of its glory each day. At my daughter's school, the entire community sang and played (faculty forming a ukulele band) "Black & White" made famous by Three Dog Night. My son loves Yoko Ono and knows that women can rock out on electric guitars. I want to cling to these allies and close my eyes to the rest of the world. I want to stay in my safe little uncontaminated liberal bubble, where no one blinks when a kid talks about his two daddies, where my kids are surrounded by others from completely different economic backgrounds, races, religions and cultures. Last week, Tom and Jay and I went for a walk by the river where we happened upon a kind of guerilla labyrinth, full of homemade totems of personal witness and faith.

As I walked the labyrinth with my hot and tired son in my arms, I thought about how my work is to grow my own heart three sizes bigger so I can love the rest of the country, as my heavenly parent does. Do I really think God likes me better than Rush Limbaugh? Well, yes, I do, but I am still very young and confused.

I have this hope that as I age, as my face falls and my muscles get soft, that my heart, which is a muscle too, will soften as well. That it will become easy for me to love the racists and the hate-mongers, that I will look out of my leathery face and see each of them as an angry three-year-old.

*"The potential for transmission of diseases such as malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus and Lyme disease is expanded with warming as the habitats of disease-carrying insects expand. Warmer seas could contribute to the increased intensity, duration and extent of harmful algal blooms, which damage habitat and shellfish nurseries and can be toxic to humans. Massachusetts loses an average of 65 acres to rising sea levels each year. Much of this loss occurs along the south-facing coast between Rhode Island and the outer shore of Cape Cod, including Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard."

I Choose This Era

Here is me playing the acoustic part.


This song is actually the oldest song on the CD. I wrote it a couple of weeks before my daughter was born, and like "Don't Wait Too Long" (which appears on our double CD Rock All Day/Rock All Night and which I wrote when I first found out I was pregnant) I still didn't know the being I was writing to. It was also right before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out, and news about the various ways in which we were trashing the planet were being regularly broadcast. That evening on the news I'd heard (again, in a new way) the ways in which the rays of the sun are so much more dangerous now than they were fifty years ago. Who knows what we are going to witness in this lifetime? But do we have a choice?

I Choose This Era

We go round the sun
The Moon goes round the earth
When the day is done
Sometimes something hurts
There’s danger in the papers
Danger on the radio
But I’ll put my arms around you and I
Will not let you go.

There’s a place called Kansas
Dorothy called it home
To me it’s just a grassland
Where I’d be frightened to be left alone
I’d much prefer a city
Even if it’s Emerald green
Home is where ever I find you
But it’s also wherever I’ve been.

And it’s not the same sun my father knew
It can burn in ways that don’t heal
But I’d take these rays with this place and your face
If that is going to be the deal

I’ll take you to the ocean
To every edge that invites me close
And there I'll make my vow to you
Before everything I love the most
There’s danger in the ocean
Danger from the sun above
But I’ll put my arms around you
And surround you with my love.
I'll put my arms around you
And I will not let you go.

Nerissa Nields
April 20, 2006

We recorded the acoustic very early in the process--I think in December 2009. We didn't put the final vocals on until December 2011, maybe even January 2012. I love the way the song came out. Katryna and I did some three-part harmony, and I am trying to get Abigail (our other sister) to learn it so she can jump up on stage with us and sing it sometime. A girl can dream.

Writing The Full Catastrophe

Third in a series of posts about the songwriting on our new CD The Full Catastrophe, due out April 10. This photo is of Dave Chalfant figuring out a kick-ass acoustic part which he played on the CD and taught to me. I now try to replicate it onstage. Dave is my favorite guitar player ever.

The genesis of this CD really began in January of 2009 when Katryna called me up, as per usual, to tell me to write a song.

"Patty just called and told me that some study just proved that people without children were happier than people with children."

"Well, yeah," I said. "The highs get higher and the lows get lower. True happiness is about sane and useful contentment. That's the exact opposite of parenthood."

"Whatever," she said. She'd been tussling lately with her four-year-old who had taken to calling her "the worst Mommy ever." "I want you to write a song about post-happiness. How having a family gives you fullness and richness and complexity."

"Ah," I said. "The full catastrophe."

"Huh?"

"You know, that line from Zorba the Greek* that Jon Kabat-Zinn riffed on for his book Full Catastrophe Living? It's a book about stress, basically, that teaches the average stressed out American how and why to meditate. I remember reading it ten years ago or so, and I read it like any self-help book, trying to get the big secret of life out. You know, do these three things and be happy and healthy for the rest of your life. I kept looking for stories about how divorcing people fell back in love, or how cancer sufferers got cured. But meditation isn't like that. It's about learning to calm yourself so you can handle the fact that no matter what you do there are no guarantees for health and wealth and fame and easy relationships and slim thighs and six pack abs. But learning to meditate can help you find that balance."

"Balance? You mean like having a career and two kids and a husband and somehow managing to raise them well, occasionally have sex, go on dates and make a five-figure income? Because I've given up on that long ago."

"I know, me too. But I like to think that my acceptance of the fact that for the next 18 years I am not going to do anything particularly well is kind of balanced. Don't you think?"

She agreed, and so I sat down and wrote this song.

Full Catastrophe
When we met, I thought our journey was over
Lock the door and shut me in.
Buy a ring, invite our friends to come over
Celebrate the holy sin
But love’s much bigger than either one of us
We knew love can’t be contained.

Don’t wanna be right, don’t wanna be wrong
Don’t wanna be smart, don’t wanna be strong
I don’t even want to be happy
If you tell me what’s true, I’ll know what to do
Then I can be me, you can be you,
We’ll have the full catastrophe

I want to see the sunset in the desert
I want the moonrise by the sea
I want our kids to sing a Bach cantata
And Appalachian harmonies
I want to be there when the early morning monsters come
I want to hold you when the spokes pull free

Don’t wanna be right, don’t wanna be wrong
Don’t wanna be smart, don’t wanna be strong
I don’t even want to be happy
If you tell me what’s true, I’ll know what to do
Then I can be me, you can be you,
We’ll have the full catastrophe

They say the hours drag but the years fly by
Some days it’s hard to find a moment to ask why
We think we’re in it for the memories
But I’d trade in every scrapbook for an hour more of sleep.

I want to rise before the kids start us spinning
Take your hand and say a prayer
I want to take you back to our beginning
Unsuspecting chose pair.
And how we traded all of our worldly goods
Bet it all on that double rainbow.

Don’t wanna be right, don’t wanna be wrong
Don’t wanna be smart, don’t wanna be strong
I don’t even want to be happy
If you tell me what’s true, I’ll know what to do
Then I can be me, you can be you,
We’ll have the full catastrophe

Nerissa Nields Feb. 2009

We recorded this song with a drummer we hadn't worked with before: Zak Trojano from Rusty Belle. Dave Chalfant played the acoustic guitar, which was good, because I didn't like the part I'd been playing. Dave gave me a whole new way to approach the song.

PS Later that year, Katryna gave her four-year-old his first ever cheese croissant. "Mommy," he gasped, chewing slowly. "It turns out, you're the BEST mommy ever!"
At the end of the movie...
*

Stop Wearing Out Your Shoes

Stop wearing out your shoes.-Jeremiah 2:25

It's because of the writers in my writing group that I got to see the full moon tonight. They insisted. And I had absolutely no defense; it's a mild lambish night in early March. The sunset, I'm told, was spectacular, and we were waiting for some group members anyway. And so I got up from my comfortable chair and the lot of us traipsed out into the sweet gentle night. There she was: filigreed with a few wisps of cloud, framed by the bare branches of our neighbor's oak. Yes, we howled.

In less than a month, our 16th CD The Full Catastrophe is due to be released. We are scrambling now to do the artwork. Right now, I should be proofreading the lyrics our graphic artist sent us. I should be posting about the writing process of one of the songs, as I have committed to do. Instead, I am worrying about my family, about what my daughter said over dinner when I mentioned that I wouldn't be home tomorrow night because I'd be in Maine doing a show, and that she should do a practice recital for her father and brother. She said, "Why are you always not at home, Mama?"

"It does seem that way, doesn't it," I said. Putting aside for the moment the notion that I might not be "home" in a more figurative way, given my disconnection to the moon and the sunset, It's true that we're facing a lot of travel. This month, we were in southern CT last week, Florida next week and Westchester county the night before her big Suzuki book one recital, the show in which she performs all 22 pieces she has learned thus far. And April is busier still. We'll be doing a "blog tour" for our book All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family which came out last September, and another one for the CD; we'll be doing radio, and traveling up and down the eastern seaboard doing shows. Am I complaining? No way. I can't wait. We are so lucky to have these shows, this media interest and a work of art we love and believe in. But I do feel absolutely torn, as countless artist/entrepreneurial moms have felt before me. How can I leave my children? How can I leave my husband? And somewhere nestled discomfitingly in there: How dare I?

Well, I'm grateful right now to the most unlikely source for the fact that I can answer that. Yes, I dare. Pardon me while I rant for a minute. The heinous ridiculousness that came spouting out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh last week has done a lot to help me get my feminist on. In fact, the whole debate about contraception has been a refreshing reminder to me that
1. I live in a bubble and so do my kids and husband.
2. There are people out there who think Rush knows what he's talking about (and by the way, does he think birth control pills function like viagra? That's the only way to make any sense out of his rant)
3. I really care that my daughter and son are well educated about contraception, about dignified ways of expressing their opinions in public and most importantly that the small voice of reason inside their own hearts is the voice to trust, and not that of some institution that purports to be their spiritual guide.

There, I've said it. The Catholic church has done a lot of good (championed the poor and worked tirelessly to provide for and protect the sick and needy all over the world; called for peace when to do so was extremely unpopular) and has given us a lot of great thinkers and writers (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thomas More, St. Ignatius, St. Augustine). But they have got to leave to Caesar what is Caesar's. Even my late, blessed, Republican Catholic mother-in-law told me a year before she died that if she had all power in the world, or could ask God for one wish, it would be for all women to have free birth control.

Meanwhile, I have got to make sure my kids know God directly, through their own quiet times, through their own communion with the full moon, through their own journey, and through their own understanding of love and respect. Is it a given to them that women should have an equal shot at those truths we have agreed should be self-evident? Is it a given to them that people (of any gender) who marry and agree to raise children together both deserve work and avocational pleasures that are fulfilling, that connect them to the community in the hopes of making a better world for all? But women cannot have anything like an equal shot if every other year they are puking in a garbage can from morning sickness, blearily trying to keep up at a meeting when they've been awake half the night breastfeeding, cleaning up after the small tornadoes that are their children and generally worried that they might get knocked up again.

OK, rant over. While it's important to look up from my own luxury problems now and then to see what the dialogue is outside of my little world where my problems are "great job but too busy for great family," we now return to our regularly scheduled program, which might be apropos. I am exhausted, as usual. I got home at 1am from the show in Connecticut (at the Kate! What a great theater!) on Saturday morning and was woken up at 6 by both kids bouncing on the bed, delighted to see their wayward mom home again. And somehow I have only just today (Wednesday) recovered from that breach in my sleep pattern. Time to reassess how I spend my precious time and calories. I need to save aside some energy for promoting this CD. I need to do less in order to do more. I need to make time to sit in silence, waiting to hear the voice that matters most. That's the voice that keeps me from yelling at my kids; the voice that comes up with the chord patterns and melodies to my songs; the voice that suggests ways in which our work can serve the greater community and not just myself.

And most of all, I need the time to teach my kids to stop wearing out their shoes, sit and be still and listen to their own inner wisdom, gaze up at the moon when she shines her lovely face down through the clouds.

How do you slow down? Do you drive until you bump into something the way I do, or do you have some kinder checks and balances?

Good Times Are Here

Second in a series about the songs on our forthcoming album The Full Catastrophe

I wrote "Good Times Are Here" in mid-winter 2008, soon after Barack Obama had won the Iowa caucus and it was clear he was a real contender for the presidency. My father had called me up the night he won, practically in tears he was so happy. I realized on the phone with him that night the difference between him and me. My father has never been afraid of optimism. He has never been seduced by sarcasm or cynicism. Once, Katryna asked him, "Daddy, how old were you when you became disillusioned?" He paused, cocked his ear to the side and said, "I haven't."

A few months later, I found out by accident that I was having a baby boy. The ultrasound tech goofed and let the pronoun slip even though I'd said I'd not wanted to know. I knew I wanted to name this boy after my dad, even to call him by the name my dad's family had called him. So this song was a love song to both father and son. I really do believe that everything we lost can be found and that it was (is) there all along in the ground.

My friend the poet Mike Biegner heard the song when I first played it in my Wednesday night writing group. "I hope you always maintain the bittersweetness of this song," he said. "It has a mournful quality to it." I didn't mean it to be bittersweet or mournful, but perhaps this was just as optimistic as this congenital pessimist could get.

Katryna sang the scratch vocal in the vocal booth while I played the guitar part, using as I usually did on this record, our friend Ben Demerath's amazing old Guild. When we listened back, Dave muttered,"That's no scratch vocal."So we kept it, and that is what you will hear when you play the track.

And I do believe good times are (always) here. The trick is to see them that way.


Good Times Are Here

It’s been so long since we had room to laugh
It’s been so long we’ve been traveling the narrow path
It’s been so long since hope had a season
Always trading sentiment for reason
And now you’re showing me the sunrise

Oh, good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
You were right, you were right all along
Oh, good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
You were right, you were right all along

I though your love was too good to trust
You had enough dreams for the both of us
And so I let you dream while I worried
Always gave you love in a hurry
And now you’re showing me the greatest surprise

Good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
You were right, you were right all along
Oh, good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
You were right, you were right all along

We ate our fear like the noble men
We built our walls to keep the children in
And every year our tribe became smaller
Trading in our heritage for dollars
And now you’re telling me to turn it around
You’re telling me to tear those walls down
That everything I lost can be found
It was there all along in the ground

Good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
You were right, you were right all along
Oh, good times are here, Johnny
Good times are here
I am glad, I’m so glad I was wrong.


Nerissa Nields
Feb. 21, 2008

A Belated, Bedraggled Valentine

It's been a bad month for horndogs.

We've had our share of really sad, scary, too-close-to home cases where someone's sex drive caused a lot of hurt in our community. I don't want to enumerate them; if you live in the Pioneer Valley, you know what I am talking about anyway. I haven't wanted to write about this because 1. it's really painful, and 2. my parents raised me not to talk about sex in public. I do fervently believe in privacy. But what comes up for me, as a mother and a feminist and someone who believes equally fervently in the power and sanctity and preciousness of community, is this question: how do we mothers of boys raise them to respect women, to respect themselves, and to see that their actions, no matter how private (and sometimes secret) have ramifications throughout their community? As Garrison Keillor once wrote, infidelity somehow seeps into the soil and poisons one's neighbor's tomato plants.

I don't know, but I suspect the answer, as usual, is love.

The latest scandal rocking our little world is the revelations that Anusara yoga founder John Friend might have cheated employees out of their benefits, made them purchase marijuana in their names for his use, engaged in extramarital sex with students and Anusara instructors as part of some Wiccan ceremonies (and also engaged in a lot of sex, just because.) While John Friend was never that interesting or inspiring to me, he was very important to my own teachers, and they are women whom I love and revere. His actions have caused a lot of hurt, and have caused my yoga teacher to sever all ties with him. This is no small thing. Her studio has been a sanctuary for so many in our community and the teachings of John Friend, which I studied intensely from 2009-2011 when I was taking the first part of the yoga teacher training (called "Immersion"), greatly impressed me and many others. John Friend may have caused a lot of harm, but he also did a lot of good.

This is the way it goes, it seems, whenever we elevate a brilliant leader to guru status, whenever a teacher begins to believe his own press releases. And it's a good reminder not to put anyone on a pedestal. Other noteworthy horndogs: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, JFK, FDR. What would the world be without them?

And yet, today I have to say I'd rather my son grow up to be a kind and faithful husband than a spiritual or political leader if by being so he was duped into thinking his behavior was excusable. Call me old-fashioned or moralistic. I don't care.

And. Where is forgiveness and what place does it have in cases like this? Where is mercy? When is it appropriate to keep what was meant to be private, private? Where are the boundaries? Where are the containers?

I went to my yoga class today. The teachers didn't mention the scandal, but one of them did say that when we come together to practice, we create a container for each other. That's exactly what I say about my writing classes, Writing It Up in the Garden, where somehow the act of coming together to write strengthens and honors each of us. I write better when I am sitting with my fellows, all of us focused on our individual goals. We keep each other honest, or at least we keep each other from getting up thirty times an hour to open the fridge, check our email or re-apply mascara. We sit, instead, and do our work.

The containers of our bodies are punctured when we love someone. We spill into and out of each other. That is how the love gets around. Sometimes it's so right, so healthy, so joyous that we weep tears of relief. We feel we are immortal, centered, egoless, complete.

I can't help but think that when people get raised so high up above others that it causes a kind of mental illness. The sense of "I" gets inflated and we start to serve that "I" even when we know perfectly well that "I" is myself, that familiar container of ecstasy and grumpiness and foibles and justifications. Even if we have committed to serving others, we still have those strange mental blind spots where it somehow can seem appropriate to take the best portion for ourselves. It's a hardening of that ego membrane, a replacing of the real spiritual fluidity that passes between us all naturally with a more graphic, literal version. It's at its root a power disorder, a confusion that comes when love gets to big, so powerful that instead of riding its current, being a channel for that Power, we reach around and wield it ourselves. For awhile, this works and we rise even higher, but eventually this misuse chokes off the source, and we start hurting people.

Yoga teaches about the hard and the soft, the pulling in of muscular energy (to use some John Friend terms) in order to unleash the organic energy which is what radiates out to the community. As Douglas Brooks says, "We are already free beings. The challenge is choosing what we yoke ourselves to."

What does love ask of us? That is the question I would give my son, the question I hope he finds on his own. I would hope he would let that question guide him in each and every interaction. And if that question could be his guide, if he could yoke himself to love, real love, the kind that is firm and muscular and masculine and honest, then I'd want nothing more.

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.

Update on our Church

Last Sunday, we drove up to church. The new building is going up. Two of the four walls are up. There is a new waterfall in the rock behind the new building--something in the blasting caused its existence. There was a way in which I hadn't really believed our church would ever come back, that it couldn't really rise from the ashes. But it did. It is.

We could see the new building from the window of the Parish House where we currently hold services. It's been almost exactly two years to the day that the circa 1839 building burned to the ground due to a faulty furnace. And today we learned that a Congregational church in Somers, CT just burned in an eerily similar fire. Before our service began, we brainstormed about ways to help the other congregation. Most of what we could give, we realized, was our experience.

For scripture, Steve read, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water."

That's it. Make a CD, do a load of laundry, pick up the kids, write a song, do a load of laundry, have a party for friends, do a load of laundry, do a photo shoot, raise money for your church that's burned down...do a load of laundry.

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.

Why An Artist Needs to Write Fiction, Even When There Are No Marshmallows

Do you remember the marshmallow experiment of the 60s? Briefly, some researchers nabbed a bunch of 4-year-olds and put them in a room together. Each child was given a marshmallow and told, "This is yours to eat. But if you wait to eat it until I come back, you will not only get to eat this marshmallow, but you will also get a second one! All for just waiting a few minutes!"


The results (filmed) were hilarious. Kids sidled around their marshmallows, eye-ing them, fingering them, mouthing them. Some kids just grabbed theirs as soon as the adult left the premises. Others waited a few minutes. Some resisted temptation and got their second fluffer as a reward--and purportedly scored better on SATs, got into better colleges, contributed more to the GNP, etc. These kids were followed all their lives. They are in their late forties now, maybe hitting fifty. And the experiment has been widely touted as proof that the ability to delay gratification is linked to higher performance elsewhere.


As you know, if you have been reading this blog, I participated in 30 Poems in November (I wrote a mere 5.) In January, I am about to start a blog writing class in the hopes of delving into my two blogs more fully, making them richer, more satisfying avenues of expression. Katryna, Dave and I are almost finished recording our new CD The Full Catastrophe, and Katryna has listed five new ideas for future CD projects (a Rock n Roll “Peter and the Wolf”; a tweener CD, a Christmas/Holiday CD; a project called Songs for Churches without Walls; a collection of folk artists covering Gilbert & Sullivan--and that's not even counting our CD aimed at school age children about Greek mythology, which we can't do now since Dar is releasing a record on the same topic. By the way, speaking of freak folk synchronicity, guess what Ani diFranco's new CD is named?)


All this is to say, I am at the stage of my life and career when I have more work than I can handle. I have writing that has to get done. Recently, for instance, I had to edit the edits of our web copy for our new HooteNanny website. Over the winter holiday, I have to re-read How To Be an Adult so I can facilitate a workshop on it for Smith College at the end of March. I have songs to write. I was supposed to write a solstice song. I have a verse and a chorus. Life is full and rich right now: I am producing a Solstice show at my son’s preschool; I came in to sing holiday songs to my daughter’s kindergarten; and Friday we are Caroling to the Animals at Smith Vocational/Agricultural School at 3:30pm (be there if you like Christmas Carols!) Isn't this real life more interesting than anything I could dream up?


But once upon a time, I did dream stuff up. I used to write novels: two novels and half of a third. Novels are the hardest of all literary forms in that one has to constantly re-read one's work in order to be effective, and that means it can take weeks just for a re-read. When I was writing, I would go for a few months with rough draft material, then read everything from beginning to end, then re-write, slashing the print-outs with a red pen. Then I'd edit, write new scenes, print out again, and try to re-read the whole thing as fast as I could--to keep all the story lines straight, to make sure that the characters were consistent. I wanted to write a book that the reader couldn't put down, so I had to make sure that my writing was strong enough for that kind of voracious reader.


My first novel Plastic Angel was published, but my agent couldn't sell my second novel, The Big Idea. I have a print out of it from 2008 in a gigantic three ring binder. I know why it didn't sell--I had plenty of encouraging and friendly rejection letters telling me why. In the end, one of the main characters didn't quite come through the way he needed to. Another character has an ending that doesn't make sense to me today. And finally, most importantly, the big idea wasn't big enough.


I know what I need to do. I need to pick up that big red three ring binder and re-read, with my red pen. But man, that binder weighs a million pounds. And I have SO MANY OTHER THINGS TO DO! Things that might actually earn me money. The marshmallows are all lined up for those other projects (granted, not that many marshmallows for a new CD these days, but still.)


I took the bag of marshmallows up to Jay's room this afternoon, where he and Elle were playing. Jay was stark naked, as is his 3-year-old wont, and Elle was on top of his bureau, about to leap to his bed. I said, "Hey, do you want to play a game?" and shook the bag of marshmallows in front of their eyes. I explained the rules and lay a tiny marshmallow in front of each of them on the bed. Then I left the room and closed the door. From the other side, I heard, "Jay, don't eat that. Don't. Eat. That. You will get another one if you don't eat that!"


I heard the bed springs bounce up and down as I checked the second hand on my watch. "I know," said Jay. I smiled. Perhaps trampoline-as-bed trumps marshmallow. When I came back in, both marshmallows were still sitting on the bed.


"That's great!" I said. "Now we don't have to worry about paying the Princeton Review." The kids shrugged and grinned and downed their treats.


There really is no good reason to try to re-write The Big Idea. In this market, it probably won't sell. Novelists other than the regular crowd from the New York Times Book Review don't make much from their advances anymore, and with the dawn of the e-reader, royalties are getting slimmer and slimmer. My family needs my attention on them. I have precious little time to read anything at all; should I really spend the next few years only reading myself?


But. The red 3 ring binder was up in the attic two weeks ago. Last week I brought it to my office on the second floor. Sometime over the weekend when I was too sick to do anything else, I dragged it to my bed. And opened it. And picked up my red pen. And marked up the first few pages. And scrawled myself a bunch of notes in the margins. And as I went for my run yesterday, I figured out a solution to one of the nagging plot points.


Why write?

Why tell a story?

Isn't this why we are here? Isn't this what we are for?

I don’t know if 2012 will be the year I tackle The Novel again. I do hope 2012 will be the year that I start to read again. I hope to read and re-read and let the stories of others filter and play through my mind. I hope to read to my kids—maybe even Harry Potter!—and to Tom. I hope to play the marshmallow game and win-- resisting the temptation to gobble up that which is in front of me, in favor of putting a little time in to unpaid, unplanned, unpaved ways that will lead me (I hope) closer and closer to my missions.