Why a Pro-Life Christian Is for President Obama

When people ask me why I am voting for Barack Obama in this election, I say, “Because I am a Christian and I vote my values.” I am pro-life, and when you line the two candidates up side by side, there’s an overwhelmingly clear choice. Which
candidate supports the life that is wriggling all over our public school’s playgrounds? Which candidate supports the lives of those who cannot afford health care, or who might be denied health care because of pre-existing conditions? Which candidate supports the lives of those on death row, who may or may not be wrongly accused? Which candidate supports the lives of our future descendants by pro-actively encouraging green, sustainable energy sources? True, Mitt Romney calls himself pro-life, but only on one issue: abortion. Given that we cannot truly know when life begins but that it’s pretty obvious that life abounds in the above situations (playground, hospitals, prisons, and—oh, yeah, the planet) I’d say Obama is the real pro-life candidate.

How to Write a Novel

Disclaimer: This post is really just my scribbling about process. So skip this if you are looking for deep spiritual insights or cute stories about my kids and read this instead.

Damned if I know. Well, OK, I do, actually. I have written a novel, and really I have written two novels. The first one, Plastic Angel, was published by Scholastic in 2005, and it's a YA about two girls finding themselves (and each other)through music. The second, called The Big Idea, is about a folk-rock band who is also a family (write what you know...). I finished a draft--five years in the writing--in 2005 and my agent tried to sell it and could not. I got many kind and encouraging letters back from various publishing houses which I stuffed away somewhere and concentrated on my growing belly and eventual daughter, and the son who came two years later. Every year or so, I would revisit the pages, making small changes. Almost every day I have thought about the characters. It feels as though they are in prison. I want to set them free. But the task seemed so gargantuan that I needed to give myself a pep talk and a plan.

And so this fall, I threw The Big Idea into the midst of a group of five incredibly talented writers, my Weeding & Pruning group. Every other week, I submit a chapter from TBI and they go at it, telling me where they are thrown out of the story, what they like, where they want to know more. We talk about what we should be reading to strengthen and inform our own writing practice. I am writing new scenes. I feel reborn, and my characters are talking to me again.

What are my professional and artistic goals in life? I ask myself this question all the time.
-I want to write gorgeous inspiring funny vibrant books and CDs that will make people feel, smile, cry, relate, understand, feel connected to each other, and grow.
-I want to be able to spend more time writing and making music. (but I need to make a living, and right now, those pursuits don't pay the bills. So....)
-I want to make a greater income than I do now through sales of my books and CDs. So...
-I want to finish my ebook How to Be an Adult, sell it online, and thus learn how to self-publish
-I want to write The Big Idea so that it is as perfect, complete, absolute as a book can be. Then I want to publish it myself.
-I want the book to come with the CD of songs the characters write. I want the CD to be a recording of a band just like the Big Idea, which will necessarily be different from what Katryna and I can do. So I want to find these musicians, find a producer, executive produce that soundtrack.
-I want to be able to pay these musicians and producer, so I need money. Maybe I will do a Kickstarter campaign when the time comes.
-In order to do any of this, I need to re-write the book. I need to find times every day to write AND to read, for I am convinced that in order to write well one must read well.
-In order to this, I need some more discipline, self-control, grit and determination, and I need to schedule my time even more precisely than I do now.

The book I am reading now is Paul Tough's How Children Succeed. I am a little more than halfway through, and I am quite taken by the premise and ideas. In a nutshell, Tough argues, it's character that makes the difference between success (a happy, productive engaged life) and failure, and not cognitive skills. Moreover, failure--or rather, learning how to use failure--is as important as success.

Paul Tough: That’s an idea that I think was best expressed by Dominic Randolph, the head of the Riverdale Country School, an exclusive private school in the Bronx where they’re now doing some interesting experiments with teaching character. Here’s how he put it: "The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure. And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything."

That idea resonated with a lot of readers. I don’t think it’s quite true that failure itself helps us succeed. In fact, repeated failures can be quite devastating to a child’s development. What I think is important on the road to success is learning to deal with failure, to manage adversity. That’s a skill that parents can certainly help their children develop--but so can teachers and coaches and mentors and neighbors and lots of other people.

I can't tell you how bummed I was every time I opened a letter from yet another publisher rejecting the book I had poured my heart into for over five years. A (bestselling) writer friend of mine said, "Just write a new book. That's what I did." And I was tempted to. I was also tempted to just say, "Well, I guess I can cross 'novelist' off my list," and focus instead on music, or non-fiction, or blogging, or the hardest and most important of my jobs: mothering. I have a full, rich life. Do I really need to be a novelist? Being a novelist is so all-consuming. It requires me to read and re-read "my own princess self" as Anne Lamott would say, encouraging my already frighteningly narcissistic tendencies. Who cares about characters who don't even exist? Pay attention to the sweet souls around my kitchen table!

Shorthand: in How Children Succeeed, Tough lists these character virtues as being the most critical:
-grit
-curiosity
-self-control
-gratitude
-zest
-optimism
-social intelligence

I took the grit test on the UPenn website and to my shock and disappointment scored about a 33%. My husband laughed when he heard this; to him I am nothing if not gritty, which may or may not be a good thing. But the questions really gave me pause. One was, "Do you finish what you start?" Another, "Are you easily distracted?"

Oops, just left this page to go check Facebook to see if my old high school buddy Wendy Gabriel had "friended" me yet.

So here's what I need to do.
1. Re-read the book.
2. Write new scenes
3. Re-read the book with the new scenes
4. Make changes accordingly
5. Read some other novels by writers I like
6. Read Suzzy Roche's novel Wayward Saints and Scott Alarik's novel Revival: A Folk Music Novel so I can see what my peers are doing with a similar subject.

In the end, finishing this novel--and by finish, I mean to my artistic satisfaction-- might be one of the most important things I do as a mother. Someone asked me recently what my goals are for my kids as little Suzuki violinists. Orchestra? A career with the Boston Pops or BSO? No. No. No. My goals for them are about the day-to-day. I want them to have music. That's it. And I know, as my sister Katryna would say, that while listening to music is powerful and can be transcendent, making music, the actual play, is always transforming. After we enter this particular communion, we come out different, changed. But having music by making music, by participating in this particular way, as a player, demands a daily practice--and grit, self-control and zest. So I will continue to practice with them, and I will model my own practice by working on my novel every day too.

Besides. The Big Idea needs a fiddle player.

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.

Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita While Climbing Mount Colden

Last weekend, Tom and I took our first ever 2 day weekend away from our kids. We've gone on overnights before, but two nights away? It seemed impossible. Thanks to our most trusted friends and relations, a dream became a reality.

Where to go? The Adirondacks, of course. What to do? Hike for 9 hours, ascending a +4700 foot peak, naturally. What, do you think we'd just sit on our butts reading old copies of the New Yorker? Well, actually, that's exactly what I wanted to do. But Tom has 46r fever, and I am a loving and supportive spouse, so we got up at 7am, made a quick breakfast, packed a gigantic lunch, filled our water bottles and packs and headed off to the Adirondack Loj.

But before we left Northampton, I dropped off my four-year-old at his pre-school and slipped into Yoga Sanctuary for some pre-vacation vacation. Sara, my teacher, preached on my favorite line of the Bhagavad Gita: Better to do your own dharma poorly than another's brilliantly. It was this line, ironically, that led me to abandon my own yoga teacher training two years ago. I had been thinking that becoming a yoga teacher would somehow mold me into the all-knowing, and incidentally gorgeous, guru/life coach I was to morph into now that my music career was in its sunset years. As we worked on opening our shoulders, I pondered this. Instead of feeling sunsetty, I was feeling pretty excited about my music career these days. Over the years, our mission has always been "write and perform songs that kids will one day sing on the back of the schoolbus at the tops of their lungs." We're actually right on track for that. Sure, we once hoped to be the next Beatles, but that ambition faded early on. Fame at that level makes it very difficult to raise a family, deeply know oneself without too many outside opinions, or have a peaceful dinner at one's favorite restaurant.

On the trail to Mt. Colden, there is a 2.2 mile walk in to Marcy Dam. There is a certain pine forest that we both remember well, somewhere on this walk in, but we are too focused on our feet and miss it. It's weird to be on this trail, a trail I have hiked so many times for so many years. Today there are scores of hikers; in fact, we almost didn't get a parking place when we arrived at 8:30am. The trail is also the one for Mount Marcy, New York's State's highest peak, and on this Saturday of Labor Day weekend, everyone seems bound and determined to bag the biggest peak. As we march along, we pass and are passed by hiker after hiker, some with walking sticks, some with oxygen tanks. "Marcy is a highway," said one of my mountain climbing gurus back in the 90s when I was doing the 46r thing. The implication was, real hikers go for the less flashy peaks. Why focus only on Number One?

Marcy Dam used to be a lake: here's Tom and our dog Cody in 2005:

But Hurricane Irene destroyed the dam, and now it's more like a swamp.(Mt. Colden is in the background).

Tom and I talk about the article in the New York Times by Firmin DeBrabender a few weeks back; in it he write about the myth of individualism, much discussed in this presidential election. I am thinking about the many many reasons that right now I am motivated to climb this peak, why I made the choice to exert myself this way instead of resting. There's no right or wrong; it's just curious. Am I climbing instead of resting because I want to be with Tom? Yes. Am I climbing instead of resting because I am driven? Yes. Not to become a 46r (I became one of those in 1993, in a kind of lemming-esque way; my whole family and group of friends were doing it, so I tagged along). Am I like Hillary, climbing "because it's there"? Definitely. And I like hiking. I love the expanse of time, part of it in silence and part in conversation with the one I love best. It's time with God. My mind needs days like this, where I am so focused on a task that it can't wander too much--especially on the steep or tricky parts. As we ascend through the woods, over rocks and soft pine, I feel myself relax, even as I exert. I feel my legs strengthen, my lungs work. I breathe in the smell of balsam, that seminal scent from my childhood, my own madeleine.

What is my dharma? Is it to make music in exactly the way I always have? Is it to encourage others to see the bonds music forges? Am I supposed to go to Divinity school? If so, why? Do people really have a dharma that is so specific, like "be a doctor" or "be a poet"? What if my dharma is just to be Nerissa?

My mission today was to be as present as I could be; to witness the journey, appreciate the birches (which have a relatively short life-span, Tom tells me, and they are my favorites.) I make a point of looking up every few minutes so that I don't get caught in my thoughts. Still, I get pretty caught up in my thoughts.

We come to many false peaks and one stinky stagnant lake (Lake Arnold). We run into a couple of young friendly Cornell students who are happy to just recline at this lake. "Don't you want to get to the top?" I say, bewildered. "We're thinking about it," they say.

At the summit, we sit and gaze at Algonquin and Iroguois, my favorite peaks. Then we pick up our lunches and move to the other side to stare at Marcy and her neighbors. A couple of very professional looking hikers come up behind us. "Is that Redfield over there?" I ask them, pointing.

"Yup, I'll give you that," says the man.

"And is that Grey?" I continue, pointing to a peak in the foreground.

"Sure is, at least I think it is," he says. I continue asking this stranger who surely must know. Then his wife says, "Congratulate him! He is a 46r today!" So we do; and then I realize that he has no better sense of which peaks are which than I do. I wish my dad were with us.

On the way down, my legs are like spaghetti. We pass the Cornell kids who decided to summit the peak after all. We are descending on a dry very rocky creek bed, with rocks the size of basketballs and watermelons for footing. My ankles wobble, and I keep tripping. "God, please strengthen my ankles," I pray. For good measure, I add, "Jesus, please strengthen my ankles," just in case. Then my mind goes off on matters of the trinity, the deity of Jesus, are they really one, etc. And the next moment, I am in midair. My hands go out to catch my fall, and my left knee scrapes on a rock. "God!" I think furiously. "What gives?"

"Are you OK?" Tom calls back.
"Yes," I say right away. But I stay where I am, even though there are a couple of older women behind us, and part of the reason I tripped was that I was hurrying to keep them from passing us, as we'd just passed them. I assessed. Scraped palms, a tiny bit of blood. Everything in working order. I got back to my feet and continued, gingerly down. "I just prayed for exactly this not to happen," I thought grumpily. "So much for prayer."

That's not exactly the point, I heard. Do you think you get whatever you pray for? What else could this mean?


And it came right back: that I will fall, even when my entire will is behind the hope that I won't. But that I will be OK. And even if I am not OK, I will not be alone. We are not guaranteed a life of ease, or to dodge every bullet when we chose a spiritual life, or to be the next Beatles, or even the next cranberries. But we are promised some company for the journey.

We staggered back to Marcy Dam a few hours later. This time I was determined to see what Tom was now calling "The pole forest," because these pines are so straight up and down that they look like they will soon be harvested as telephone poles. We look and look. Everywhere there are deciduous trees, ancient ones, new ones, mixed with all sorts of evergreens. And then finally, about a half mile from the parking lot we come to it. It's just a few hundred yards of forest, but the trees are uncannily uniform. And even with the occasional hiker passing us, it's eerily still, with that trademark whistling the wind makes in tall pine trees. We both stop and let the hikers pass.

"This is my church," whispers Tom.

August

Mid-August, I am deep in edits and rewrites of How to Be an Adult, which I hope to publish as an ebook sometime this fall. Today, though, I am working on a much grander piece: a play to be performed by my kids and their five cousins on the occasion of my father's 70th birthday. We're decamping to the Adirondacks for high merriment (and some required golf, tennis and hiking.) The play is about a School for Wizardry, Music and Mountaineering called Nieldsworts, and the hero is a grandfatherly character named Granddaddydore. Each of the kids is possessed with a magic instrument (drum, guitar, violin, maraca, etc.) Abigail (our sister who is an actor) will play Granddaddydore, Katryna will be the narrator, the kids will be themselves (only with Potteresque names like Ginny Reesely and Liley Granger and the highly original Johnny Harry Potter and the actually brilliant Ementor). I am going to direct, which means there will probably be lots of fights.

Falcon Ridge seems eons ago. I intended to write a long piece on how great it was, how brave the folks who prevail against the almost inevitable bad weather, and how the whole festival never fails to energize me for the rest of the year, inspire me with new musical ideas, remind me how much I love to play with a band. So even though the actual weekend is now firmly in my rear view mirror, it has left me with a resolve to deepen my musical practice. To wit:
-I'm taking voice lessons with a 78 year old amazing voice teacher in Amherst
-I'm about to start taking guitar lessons, with the goal being to learn the entire Beatles catalog
-I'm thinking about our next big musical project (Katryna, as usual, is full of big ideas)
-We're planning to play the Iron Horse on Oct. 13 with our CrackerJack band. If we could, I'd play monthly with the band. There's nothing, NOTHING like being with those guys to fill me with joy.

In fact, it makes me wonder why we stopped. Then I remember. It cost too much. Too much time, too much sanity, too much gas, too much summer, too much views of highways, too much smelly rock clubs and shows that started at 11pm. Not enough early mornings looking out at my own garden.

Part of me wants to just let the music and the touring life consume me, use me up. And part of me hears my daughter practicing her violin. She is playing Two Grenadiers by Schumann right now. I can hear her wade through the difficult middle section, and when she gets to the phrases from the French National Anthem, she blasts through, playing it three times too fast. Don't we all?

Singing for Old Friends Gone at Falcon Ridge

It's Falcon Ridge Prep week. Fortunately, I did not take the teaching job I was considering last time I posted, and so I have had time to make playlists, run around and clean while listening to Tracy Grammer and Dave Carter, Bill Morrissey, The Band, Lowen & Navarro and oh, yes, our own soundtrack, so I can learn and re-learn songs.

It wasn't always like this. In the 90s, we just did our thing, carefully calculating how many times we could perform, which songs to sing to maximize CD sales, and trying to play as many workshops as we could. But over the years, Falcon Ridge has become a family. We have come to know and love the other artists who frequent the folk festival, and so we learn each others' songs, play onstage during each others' sets. And this year, grieve when we lose one of our own.

Eric Lowen, one half of the partnership known as Lowen & Navarro, played Falcon Ridge every year since (I believe) 2003. In 2009, he retired from touring, but I am pretty sure he was onstage with Dan Navarro in 2010. He was diagnosed with Lou Gerrig's disease in 2004, and this diagnosis only sharpened his resolved to devote his life to music and writing and touring and singing his heart out. Year after year, we watched him climb the stage, later with a lot of help and seated in a wheelchair. Year after year, he gazed out over the field, making eye contact with audience members, sharing his craft with his fans, winning over new ones. Year after year, Dan Navarro sat beside him, blowing everyone away with his own singing and killer guitar playing.

This year they will not be onstage. Neither will Bill Morrissey, Dave Carter or Levon Helm. But their music will be.

One thing I have added to my schedule recently is voice lessons. As many readers know, Katryna has long suffered from vocal polyps which have caused her to have to cancel shows to heal her voice. This has been going on since our Gotta Get Over Greta days when we had to cancel our entire fall tour after recording that album. But Katryna is better, thanks to finally finding a most extraordinary 78 year old voice teacher in Amherst named Lois Smith. Katryna, I am sure you will agree, sounds better than ever; more importantly, she now has the stamina to sing all week and still be able to perform on weekends. Why wouldn't I avail myself of this teaching? Besides which, once when we played with Joan Baez, she told me, "Just be sure to get yourself a good voice teacher and keep on studying." What's good enough for Joan...

I started last week. Vocalizing with Lois at the piano. At one point, I wondered if I could poke my eyes out with some sticks; that would have been more interesting. But I did have to admit, she warmed my voice up, and I know enough from my study of yoga that steady, tender, slow exercise works miracles. So I told her I'd be back this week. She wrote me up a practice plan which I promptly folded up and stuck in my backpack.

Yesterday, I arrived again at her house and unfolded my practice plan like a good girl.
"Good!" she exclaimed. "Did you practice three times a day?"

I gagged. "Um, not quite," I said.

"Well," she said, shaking her head. "You have to practice three times a day."

On Tuesday night, the CrackerJack band assembled at Sackamusic in Conway, with Dave Hower on drums and Paul Kochanski on bass. Dave Chalfant played a fine looking Epiphone, and we ran through our songs in an un-airconditioned loft. They all sounded much better like that: sweaty and disgusting. There was also no toilet paper for the bathroom. Very rock and roll.

It happened like it always does. At some point (possibly during the very first chords, Dave Hower locking right in with Dave and Paul; me finally feeling (again) like I really belong somewhere) the smile came to my face unbidden and just spread and spread, threatening to turn to tears. I laughed, I relaxed. My band does this. I had an awareness during the entire rehearsal of just how lucky I am. How many 45 year old women get to play with a rock band? How many get to write the songs that write band then interprets? I can't believe this is my life.

This year, I didn't blow my voice out during rehearsal. And today I practiced my voice lesson homework.

It's taken me 45 years to get back to the place I was when I was seven years old and first knew I wanted to be a singer. I knew then what I later denied; that the voice is (sorry to be so woo woo, but) sacred. This week, it's come together for me. Listen to Bill Morrissey sing "Birches." Listen to Dave Carter sing "The Gentle Arms of Eden." Listen to Eric Lowen sing "We Belong." And now listen to Levon Helm sing "The Weight." And now listen to Mavis Staples and Nick Lowe sing "The Weight." Does listening to these angels do to you what they do to me? Though I wish more than anything to put it into words, I fear I'll fail, but I will try anyway. This is the voice of God. Each one of them. Each crazy, divine, fully human utterance is God to me, each stab at the truth, each blind belting, and even though I am just me, a 45 year old woman who never had a hit song, who drops her kids off at school every day, who shops at Target, who , I get to sing too. I get to sing along alone in the car, and I get to sing to the kids in the music classes I run, and I get to sing onstage in front of thousands of people. I get to do this crazy thing called singing, which is like reaching inside to the softest, silkiest realest part of yourself and turning it inside out and presenting it shamelessly to the world. It's the most vulnerable thing a person can do, and I get to do it and survive.

Us practicing "Snowman" Tuesday night

Busibombs

"Mama, what are busibombs?" my six-year-old asked me tonight, making a delightful mondegreen out of the number one term the grown-ups in our family offer the children when explaining why we can't do whatever it is we all wish we could do––"busyness." I suspect we'll be referring to busibombs for years to come, though part of me hopes we come to our senses sooner rather than later as busyness is truly the scourge of our times. She asked the question because we were tossing a number of busibombs around and concluding that we were probably too busy to do them.

"Busibombs" are delectable events that get lobbed into the midst of our already full-to-the-brim existence and send us sprawling against the walls, only to pull ourselves up, resentfully and sleepily, too stupid to do anything right, but too attached to let go of any of amazing treats exploding out of this crafty pinata of a missile. Today's busibombs include a new teaching opportunity, an invitation to play music at the church we are almost always too busy to attend, the desire for our youngest child to start cello lessons this fall with accompanying scramble to find the time to add this in, a gig in Vermont on the same day for which our son's birthday party had been scheduled, and the fantasy of trading our truck in for a Vanagon so we can car camp on Cape Cod and Yosemite.

By now you have probably read the recent New York Times piece on busyness. If you are like me, you will be too busy to read it. My favorite line is, "More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter."

My first response was "Amen, brother!" And I would have chortled and nodded my head, too, if I had read this ten years ago. I was like the author: someone who had figured out how to make a living working about four hours a week, not counting the time it took to get to the gigs that paid me to live like this, but since that travel time was perfectly pleasant, who cared? Even if you amortized my salary over the travel time and performing time, I still made off well. I used my travel time to read, write, correspond, see the country and my far away friends, have adventures, and best of all, just stare out the window of the airplane, car or van. I certainly had plenty of time to write my novel and my songs, and even the newsletter that went out to our fans and the occasional email which had not yet taken over my inbox. Somehow I also used to have time to run 6 miles a day, and do yoga and Pilates three times a week. And I wrote three pages of brain-drain in my journal first thing in the morning. And I read novel after novel, lining them up under my bench seat in the van as though on a shelf. And I napped. Oh, how I napped!

Then I examined my own life today and I stopped chortling and noticed bitterly how the guy has no kids and appears to be independently wealthy. He has no clue, I muttered. Today, it's a huge feat if I even open one daily email from the New York Times. I rarely check Facebook, I never watch TV and read almost only audiobooks. This is very bad for anyone, but especially bad for writers and artists who need time to read and reflect. Why do I let myself get this busy? How did this happen? Who can I blame?

The current epicenter of busibombs is a week-long Suzuki camp where my daughter is a camper and I am the music enrichment teacher, though even if I weren't teaching, I'd still be exhausted as parents are expected to be fully present and awake, taking notes on their child's lessons and classes, going to parent lectures, attending (without smartphones) daily hour-long recitals. On day three, one of the master teachers told us parents that she and the other teachers were all horrified at the lack of polishing and refinement our kids pieces evinced at these daily recitals. "They don't need to be perfect," she said. "But they do need to try to be perfect."

I had genuinely mixed feelings about this. No one loves to listen to a Bach concerto played woodenly or with multiple stops and starts, but to my mind it's worth the stumbles to witness the process, to see kids get up in front of their peers and demonstrate their hard work. Also, as a professional musician, I happen to love the moments when we--or my peers-- mess up and keep on going. The music is so much bigger than the musician. I know that we are going to forget lyrics, I'm going to play the wrong chord or speed up phrases here and there, but ultimately, the show is about so much more than the musician's artistry or lack thereof. It's about courage and honesty and reaching for beauty. When I see kids attempting Bach or Brahms it sends chills up my spine, even when their efforts fall short of perfection. So I quietly disagreed with the teacher, and also noted that I can ask more of my child. Sometimes I don't push her on the refining aspects because I am in too much of a hurry and too busy to take the time, to weary to have the fight.

That night when I came home, my husband said, "It's a hot day. Let's go to the beach and bring a picnic."

"Sorry," I said. "We have to practice violin."

He looked at me as though I'd just suggested we build an igloo in our front yard. "But she's been playing violin all day! It's summertime!"

I leaned against the counter, knowing if I didn't do some deep yogic breathing in that moment, I might explode--and not like a pinata.

"The teachers require it," I said through gritted teeth.

"So?" he said.

"So I want my daughter to go to camp tomorrow prepared. They have a concert on Friday."

"It's Wednesday," he said dismissively. "She can practice tomorrow."

I wanted to cry. How could he not get it? Were we that far apart? What was wrong with the nuns who educated him? Didn't they teach him to strive for perfection?
And then I was crying. My two kids came and hugged my legs anxiously as they do whenever I cry in front of them.

"You're challenging my every tribal assumption!" I wailed.

And he was. My father regularly woke at 5 and was out of the house before we got up. He'd return at ten and kiss us softly on the tops of our sleeping heads. On Saturdays, he and my mother would drive for hours to compete in professional level tennis tournaments, rush home to shower and go out to a party. On Sundays they'd wake early to prepare for "Junior Worship," a music and Bible story program they ran at our church. Sunday afternoons were family time, but we spent these playing competitive family tennis and going out for dinner, the self-appointed judges of the area-wide Perfect Pizza contest. When my sisters and I woke on weekday mornings, we'd inevitably find my mother head in hand, elbow on the kitchen table frantically grading her high school students' history papers and preparing for her classes. Certainly we were told we did not need to be perfect. But the assumption that we'd better spend our waking moments trying was mixed deeply into the very plaster of our walls.


Tom relented and we made a quick swap: he'd be my practice ally that night if I agreed to go to the beach the next. I agreed (though I made my daughter practice Thursday before the beach.) "We can't right all our parents wrongs," I said. "But we can try. I wish someone had pushed me musically when I was her age."

Tom looked at me funny, and nodded, perhaps as though I were an Alzheimer patient. The next day when I repeated this to another parent at the camp, he said, "But you wouldn't be the artist you are if you'd become a virtuoso."

These busibombs, they come by phone, by email, in the heart of a child bursting into the kitchen with some new plan that sets my carefully worked-out scheme off course; and then we follow it. As we crouched in the cool water of the lake on Thursday, the sun just beginning to set behind the trees, our kids splashing and yelling at us to watch their new strokes and their latest daredevil feats, I sighed and took Tom's hand. "You win," I said. "This is the thing to do. God's here in this lake. We're going to wake up exhausted tomorrow, but this is what we will remember. Thank you."

Tangled Up In Blue

"I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that..." -B. Dylan

I finished the amazing Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethrope when she was in her early twenties, at the same time my early twenties meme chose Tangled Up in Blue was celebrating its 25th anniversary. Katryna and I came to celebrate and open the show for them.




Tangled Up in Blue started in the fall of 1987. I'd almost lost my voice to nodes the summer before, shrieking "Born in the USA" an octave up from Bruce to 300 campers a day, and in my forced silence (3 1/2 weeks of complete voice rest plus steroids was my prescription) I made a vow: should I get my voice back, I would no longer hide it as I had freshman year at Yale. Too scared to audition for the a cappella groups, or to play any of my own songs outside my bedroom, I was at risk of drowning in my sea of insecurity. If my voice came back, I would do something. Something big.

But until then, I'd do something fun. Why not start a folk singing group? Yale didn't have one. We could sing some old songs, Peter Paul and Mary arrangements with an added bass part. I asked my then boyfriend Trex what he thought. Previously a non-singer, Trex was always up for anything, "I'll get the entire FOOT crowd," he said. "I'll get the Berkeley common room." And he got both. He said, "Show up with your guitar at 7pm Tuesday," and I did. In my hand I clutched my first arrangement" "Come Go With Me To That Land," in my rhythm-challenged notation. We had about ten people there that day; the following week we had fifteen. The third week we were back to ten, but we had at least one per part (always shortest on tenors) and that was good enough for me. At some point, towards the spring, Leon Dewan joined us on lead guitar, and we had our first "jam" (as a cappella concerts are called, at least they're called that at Yale.)


The other brave thing I did was "rush" the mainstream a cappella groups. In the middle of our second or third rehearsal, members of Proof of the Pudding swept in and sang me out of the Berkeley Common Room, members of what would become TUIB looking on with some pride and perhaps confusion. A few days earlier, I'd heard that I'd gotten into the Yale Glee Club. I was now in three singing groups. Would I come back to them?

Well, of course. In those very first rehearsals, I knew I'd found what I'd been looking for: a group of people with whom to share what I loved most: music, activism, laughter, politics. In the years that followed, I eventually quit everything but TUIB, letting the music direction fill the evenings that weren't taken by Shakespeare, classical guitar, poetry and my own songwriting. The first friend to come out to me was a freshman from Tangled Up in Blue. I was initiated into the counterculture; me a nice Democrat from an upper middle class Virginia home.

The fall of my junior year, the group held its first auditions, and to our amazement, people actually showed up to try out. We worked hard those years, but mostly we were having fun. I pushed the group to be more precise musically, and some folks left because of that. During March spring break, we decided to go on "tour" and hopped in some cars and drove down I-95 to stay, half of us at Trex's mother's house and half at my parents'. We performed at my old high school and made enough money to pay for our gas and several huge spaghetti dinners.

That spring, Leon came bounding into our rehearsal space (now Byers at Silliman College) and said, "Hey! I just got us a booking at CBGB's!"
I felt as though someone had pounded me on the back, in a congratulatory manner, but a little too hard. CBGB's? Home of the New York Dolls, the Patti Smith Group, Television, the Raomones, Blondie and the Talking Heads? I was going to bring my little Yale folk a cappella cum guitar band? I had to call my once and future band mate David Jones to tell him. He'd be chartreuse with envy.

We climbed back into the assortment of cars we used to get anywhere--my 82 Chevette with the broken window and missing rear view mirror and Trex's Mitsubishi that I'd totaled the year before--and made the pilgrimage to the Bowery.

It was a crisp spring day, and it was still light when we arrived for sound check. The club was empty except for Jimmy at the bar who let us in and swung around to the soundboard as we clambered up the stage. The place reeked of beer and piss and vomit. The walls were covered with beer cans. The stage was chalkboard black. I was afraid it would bite me. I was not entirely sure this wasn't the headquarters for satanic rites. It was so dark inside I forgot it could be light anyplace else. And I felt like I might levitate with excitement. Jimmy said if we brought him a blank tape, he'd tape the show from the board for us. We ran around the corner to a bodega and brought him back a Maxell casette. As I was tearing off the plastic wrap, Joe Shieber, our excellent tenor said, "Nerissa, you should play one of your songs." I froze. I'd never performed a song I'd written in front of anyone all alone, by myself, other than this group of people.

"Only if Leon plays one of his," I said.

We mounted the stage at 12:30 on a Wednesday night. We did our repertoire: "Come Go with Me to That Land," "Seven Bridges Road," "Hangman," "The Times They Are A Changing," "Ohio" and "Hurry Sundown." I played a new song by myself called "Agape." Leon played "Farm of Isosceles." There were two people in the audience and I think we made two bucks.

A few months later, or maybe it was the following year, we went as a group to see and hear Pete Seeger, along with Mikata, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. After the show there was a VIP gala upstairs. We galloped through the red velvet cordons and formed our horseshoe, singing "Wimoweh" to the Holy One. He excused himself from some major donor he'd been talking with and came over to listen to us kids. "Wonderful," he croaked. (He was about to turn 70 if I have my dates right. It's amazing how long a person can be old.) "You all should think about coming to Peekskill. I'd love to organize a workshop on rounds."


We floated home that night, extolling Pete's (underappreciated) skills on the banjo, gazing at his autograph (which we then used shamelessly in a "teaser" for our next Jam), feeling certain that we had arrived.




When I graduated, along with many of TUIB's founding members, we decided to celebrate by driving around the country in Steven Michel's father's Suburban (Ben) and a rented minivan (Jerry). Above is our plotted route. We spent many a night in sleeping bags on the floors of the homes of alums and kind parents, and we ate a lot of pizza. We sang at Old Faithful and made $75, and we saw the Grand Canyon and Paolo Soleri's Utopia at Arcosanti.

As I was unpacking from this trip, in my first post-college apartment, I had Bob Dylan's Dream playing on my turntable. (Yes, a TURNTABLE!!!) I had to stop what I was doing and sit on the bed, tears streaming down my face. It took me about two years to stop grieving what I lost when I left college and TUIB behind, and the only thing for it was to start a new band.

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told, our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied
Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music


Leon Dewan today

Mustard Seeds and the Newport Folk Festival

Nerissa & Katryna and the Falling Down Barn in 2007

I have sudden and severe laryngitis. I can no longer yell at my kids. In fact, I feel myself to be so at their mercy that I am being extra nice to them, smiling a lot, giving them heretofore forbidden juice boxes, letting Elle play "Two Grenadiers" over and over during her violin practice and not making her play her review pieces at all. Things are going so well with me not talking that I am contemplating feigning voicelessness indefinitely. Who, really, would miss my pontificating? (Don't answer that.) To top it off, I made Elle read to me last night. She can sort of read, but she'd much prefer someone read to her, especially since we're halfway through Harry Potter. But she gamely attempted Owl At Home last night, and because she had no choice, she made it through an entire chapter. I was reduced to clapping and vigorously nodding my head, poking at the page with one finger when she didn't get the word right. It made me wonder if I would write more if I spoke less.

In my Underground Seminary, I have been instructed to ponder Mark 4:26-35, otherwise known as the Parable of the Mustard Seed. More on the Underground Seminary in a future post. The piece of this passage I particularly love is the brilliant observation that God's Kingdom can come to us from the most minute of "seeds"; a stranger's look of kindness. A song on the radio in the grocery store. Someone's Facebook post. And the sower is oblivious to the "fruits" of her labor. Once she's sown her seeds, she leaves the rest to the soil, the sun, the rain.

26 He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

The other big event in our lives is that we are finally attempting to fix our falling-down barn. I had huge fantasies of renovating it and turning it into a writer's den/underground church/Tom's office/yoga studio/guest house. That will have to wait until the sales of The Full Catastrophe exceed $5 million/our kids get through college/Universal Health Care passes. In the meantime, if we don't salvage what is there, we will have to tear it down (which would not be free--it would cost us $10,000 and then we'd have no place to dump our stuff, I mean keep our bikes and kayak and canoe.)

It's not the money I mind. It's that we are spending our early mornings cleaning the thing out. We discovered a squirrel's nest the length of almost 4-year-old Jay, way in the back. And among the squirrel's treasures was a box that contained all my old arrangements for Tangled Up in Blue and subsequent singing groups I ran pre-Nields (Tintinnabulations, A Capelicans, the Jimmies; groups we ran while teaching high school). GOLD! Hooray! Plus a bunch of press shots of the trio Nields that freaked us all out. And, the coup de grace, the program from the Newport Folk Festival 1994, the year we got to play it.

That was almost twenty years ago, and it was surely the turning point in our career. We got the gig because we had become friends with the associate producer's daughter (Nalini Jones, now a writer and mom) at the Loomis Chaffee School where we were teachers and dorm adults at the time. When I close my eyes, I can feel myself back up on that stage, the sea air over Fort Adams blowing my hair into my eyes, my mouth aching from grinning so much. We played first in the line up, and people were still streaming into the park at the beginning of our set. We sold over 200 copies of our then-new CD Bob On the Ceiling, and from that moment, everything about our career sped up dramatically, shaking the tree we lived in until we all came tumbling down, but not without a lot of shouting for joy into the wind.

The Nields at Newport 1994

Nalini had asked me to write for the program, an essay called "Know Your Song Well," about being a folk musician in the early 90s when folk was making a comeback. I will post this essay separately, but for now I will say that reading it made me realize that my band came along at the most fortuitous time, and that if we were in our mid 20s now instead of then we probably wouldn't have had a shot. I don't write this to take away an iota of our hard work and possible talent; but I do say it to make the case for fate, for history, for the Perfect Storm of events in any person's life or career. Or for the winds that blow that little mustard seed here and yon. Who knew what we sowed then? Who knew where those 200 copies of Bob on the Ceiling went?

Katryna and I have been talking a lot lately about fame. I have written this before on this blog, but when we were in the van driving around and around, Patty used to ask, "Would you rather be rich or famous?" "Rich," said a couple of members. "Famous," said a few others. And I said, "Neither. I want to be influential."

Of course, if you believe the Law of Attraction, this was a big mistake on my part. Everyone is influential. I should have manifested money and acclaim instead. Then I'd have my barn cum church/writing den/office/guest house. But on the other hand, it is really lovely to have exactly the amount of fame and money that I do have. It's perfect. If I had any more money, I might not teach as much as I do, and teaching is so good for me, so pleasurable, so connecting. And if I had any more fame, I would feel scared. As it is, I have the kind of fame where people I don't know are nice to me for no reason at all. Occasionally friendly people come up to me at the airport and tell me they saw my band fifteen years ago in Ann Arbor, or Austin TX, or Portland OR, or South Carolina (we were always playing in South Carolina.)

Last Thursday we had the great privilege to play a house concert in Rhode Island, in a house overlooking Narragansett Bay. The folks who opened their home to us had first seen us in 1994 at Newport and had bought a copy of Bob that day. 18 years later, their home was filled with friends who listened as attentively and laughed as hard as any audience we've ever had. There were 40 people there that night. That might seem small compared to the 2000 we played for at Newport in 1994, but to me, that night felt just as magical. What is the Kingdom of God? In a word, Unity. That feeling that you are a part of something so much bigger than yourself, so much more than you can ever hope to understand. As a performer, nothing makes me feel as whole, as unified, as part of some bigger mystery than singing my songs with my sister to an audience who gets it. What is the Kingdom of God to you?

Nerissa & Katryna overlooking Narragansett Bay last Thursday

30 Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. 32 Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”

10 Things I Know About Time Management

Somehow, against all odds, I have become a pretty good time manager. This from a girl who used to lie on her back helpless under the weight of the world, AKA procrastination. For many years, I was unable to do the things I most wanted to do, namely my homework, any kind of exercise, or to practice my instrument. The needed effort to get up for any reason other than to open the refrigerator to forage for a snack just wasn't there. But people can change.

I just celebrated my 45th birthday. 45 is a prodigious number, and for women it holds special significance, as 45 really is (usually, anyway) the age after which we won't be having (any more) children. But I spent a lot of time on my birthday remembering another turning of the year: the birthday when I turned twenty. That was the year I began to grow up, the year I planted a lot of seeds that have been coming to fruition ever since. I told the blogging class I teach to do a practice post in which the writer offered some bit of wisdom or information in her/his own voice, concisely and with some humor. I thought I'd try to do the exercise too, so today, here is what I know about my topic du jour: time management.

Ten Time Consciousness Maxims

1. Get really clear on priorities, and do first upon awakening the thing that matters most. Getting clear on priorities is actually the hardest part of time management. If you don't know what you want, you can't do it. (More on this coming up.) Instead, you'll race around doing what others want, or you'll be like I was, flat on your back or glued to a TV screen with one finger in a jar of almond butter. How do you find out what you want? Get to know yourself. For me, this meant writing in a journal (another thing I wanted to do but couldn't--until I took advantage of a wormhole.) Eventually, I just made myself write first thing when I got up in the morning. It was like having a therapy session with myself. The writing was awkward at first, but over time I got to like it. And more importantly, I got to like me. What mattered most? It changed over time, but when I was twenty, it was music. So on songwriting days, I’d pour the coffee and sit down on the carpet with my guitar and notebook. Later, it became journaling. Then exercise, then meditation. Now it’s my husband and kids; I am sure to give them my full attention when they first wake up.
Conversely, to find out what doesn’t matter, do this exercise: make a graph of a week and systematically write down exactly how you spend your waking hours (and how much you sleep, for that matter.) Don’t try to edit your actions. Honesty is key here. If you spend 14 hours a week watching TV, write it down. At the end of the week, see how much time you actually spend working, exercising, emailing, Facebooking (who knew that word would become a gerund? Sorry about that.) See where your “lost” time is. With this knowledge, you can move forward and make the changes necessary to do the activities you really want to be doing.

2. Maximize Your High-Energy Time Zones. You might already know when in the day you have the most energy. Then again, you might regulate yourself by dosing up with caffeine and beer. This might work for now while your body is at its vigorous peak, but sooner or later your circadian rhythms will take over, and at this point it will be very helpful to (in unison, please): Know yourself.
One miserable summer between sophomore and junior year, I decided I might as well sleep between 1-6, whether am or pm. I seemed to thrive from sunrise to about lunch, and then wilt until dinnertime. Undaunted, I just drank some more caffeine.
Later, I solved this problem by taking a fifteen-minute power nap at about 12:30pm. And then drinking some caffeine. But I still tend not to schedule anything very important during what I think of as my low energy zones: 11-1pm and after 9pm (though if we have a gig, I am usually still onstage at 9pm.
I do notice that my energy is highest when I first get up. (I recognize that this is not true for everyone). So I like to use this high-energy time to do something I might not have the wherewithal to do later. In the beginning, I chose to journal every day first thing. Later, this switched to meditation and exercise. After many years, I know that I write best in the evening, and that midday is a great time to read or watch a portion of a video. My appetite peaks at 7am, 11:30am and 5pm, so that’s when I eat. I used to eat dinner at 7pm when my parents always ate, but this meant I was “dalling down” (my daughter’s phrase for starving to death) and snacked like crazy in the late afternoon. Now I just cut to the chase and serve everyone dinner then.
Notice your own high and low energy zones. Eat when you’re hungry, rest when you’re tired. Don’t hitch your rhythms to anyone else’s and see what comes naturally.

3. Find a planner and get married to it. Julie Morgenstern, author of Time Management from the Inside Out strongly suggests choosing just one, and I couldn't agree more. It's when I write the kids' friends' birthday parties down on my wall calendar and neglect to put it on iCal that I get into trouble by double booking myself at a reading in Brookline. Keep all dates and to do lists in one place.

4. Your datebook and your to-do list are like Donnie & Marie. Apologies to those born after 1977. What I mean by this is that your to-do list is useless if you don't schedule in when you are going to do each to-do. To this end, the first event you need to honor is an hour a week of planning time, and then five minutes a day following that up, with calendar and to-do lists in hand. I look at my week on Sunday night, and I write down what needs to get done and when I am going to do it. I refine this process each morning, going day by day.* Inevitably there are surprises: my manager will email me to remind me that I need to send out a newsletter to our fans, and then my two hours to write my novel or find my summer clothes in the attic gets postponed. I go through phases where housekeeping is more important, and phases where it takes the back burner. Ditto the amount of time I spend trying to look presentable. But I always make time for family, exercise, writing, music and reflection. (In fact, there usually ends up little time for anything else. Oh, well.)

5. Schedule Down Time and Family Time or Risk Burnout and Fallout. And Possibly Divorce Enough said.

6. Leave Space for God/Chance/Lila/Sh*t Happens. Whenever I schedule myself to the minute, I get tripped up. I am not running the show. If I don't give myself big margins in between the things I want to do, nothing in my life seems to work. I have a strong sense that God wants me to help out. So I leave space to make phone calls, take phone calls, make a meal for a friend in need, pick up someone's kid for a play date (and this means leaving space and margins in my kids' schedules), have an impromptu date with my husband.

7. Wisely Use Small Pockets of Time. For things I don't like to do, I work well in tiny increments, say 15 minutes or less. Any more makes me anxious. So I trick myself by saying, "I don't feel like cleaning up the dishes right now, but I'll just do it for 5 minutes." Then I set the timer and go. Usually, if/when the timer goes off, I ignore it because by then I am immersed in my task, it's almost done and I have a rage to finish it. Here are some things I can do in small pockets/packets of time:
-make one phone call
-meditate (15 minutes, sadly, is really my limit, even though I have been a meditator for almost 15 years and honestly believe it is the key to all happiness)
-run around the park (I shoot for 20 minutes of running per day or 30 minutes of walking)
-ablutions (5)
-dishes (I say 5 but it's usually 10-15)
-my daughter’s violin practice (30 though I trick us both by saying "short practice today")
-guitar practice (my own, sadly, 10 minutes, once in a blue moon)
-check in/snack with husband (every evening, 20 minutes)
-"reading" audiobook on iPhone (every chance I get, especially while cleaning or running)
-yoga (5-7 minutes-good for one sun salutation or the stomach series in Pilates)
-journaling (Dar Williams gave me a Five Year Journal five years ago. It's the best. I can only write about 1" by 2" worth of text per day. But over time, I can look back and see what I was doing the previous year(s). I used to write 3pp of long hand every day. Not so much since having kids.)

8. Don't Kill Your TV. That's what I did. Yes, I'm way more productive, but I miss out on all the cool shows. I am hopelessly behind on Downton Abbey, and I have never even seen Mad Men. When I used to watch TV, I would multitask. I would knit and mend clothes and sew on buttons, or I'd prepare a mailing. Since I don't have TV, I don't have any pockets of time to do these sorts of tasks, and so I don't do them at all. Plus, there's something really great about watching a show with your honey. Then again, there's something really great about actually talking to your honey, which is what I get to do.

I’m being a bit facetious, of course; and partly I am reacting from having just read Laura Vanderkam’s awesome book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think in which she makes many good arguments for killing one’s TV. I did stop watching TV, about 10 years ago, and I don’t miss it (that much). Vanderkam’s book is excellent at showing how to minimize wasted time, and she defines wasted time as driving around to do errands, cleaning up one’s house, making meals, doing laundry. She says that if you can afford to, offload all these chores onto someone else. But I’d argue that some of these tasks can become “found” time, the way I used to “find” time to do my knitting while I watched TV. Here is what I do while simultaneously doing housework, including laundry.
-listen to an audiobook like Laura Vanderkam’s
-listen to music or a podcast or the radio
-catch up with myself
-think about a song idea or plot for a novel
-cultivate mindfulness
-talk to my husband or child
-make a phone call
-plan my week

9. Do It Now. My parents taught Katryna and me this major life lesson when we were wee lassies. They had it embossed on some Scotch glasses (naturally), and I must say, they modeled that behavior pretty darn well. The idea behind Do It Now is that you are and you will be busy. So busy that if you don’t do it now (“it” being, let’s say, a bill from the phone company, and “do” being “pay it”), it will become an annoying piece of paper in your inbox whose little burst of energy has been lost. It won’t get paid on time, and you will end up paying a penalty. Same with answering email: if I read the email and don’t respond right away, I inevitably lose a bit of my enthusiasm for the response. (Though sometimes, if the email invokes a too strong response from me, it’s probably better for me not to do it now.)
Whenever you get the idea to do something worthy, at least consider doing it now. This works really well if you’re in the kitchen and have just finished a meal and there’s not a lot else going on and you remember that you need to call the plumber to fix your toilet. It doesn’t work so well if you’re in bed with your lover and you suddenly think about alphabetizing your books.

The other big time management life lesson my parents taught, which went along with Do It Now, is “you’ll feel really good about yourself if you do what you’re supposed to do when you said you would do it.” Of course, this might come under the category of “brainwashing,” but it was an effective way to internalize a strong parental directive.
One caveat: I am especially keen to organize my systems—RIGHT NOW-- when I have a project due, especially a book. If I am supposed to be writing, I suddenly become very interested in organizing my spice rack and sorting through my children's clothes. There is a reason for this. The creative part of one's brain feels safer when it's in a structured environment. I have no idea if this is true, but I do know that every writer I've met agrees that, helpful or not, they feel compelled to clean house before they sit down to write. It seems the very act of cleaning and sorting gives the brain a burst of serotonin and energy. After de-cluttering, I write like a fiend, have fantastic conversations and am prone to do spontaneous handstands.

10. Give Perfectionism the Boot. Perfectionism, says Anne Lamott, is the enemy of the people. It's a sad, evil lie, the single worst foe of all creative types. Perfectionism is the Devil Incarnate. Perfectionism whispers to us, "This is your one and only chance. Don't blow it." And then we're stymied. God tells us, "I've got your back. Go for it. You'll learn from your mistakes. There are no wrong turns, as long as you follow the dictates of your heart and stay honest."


*By "I" I actually mean Julie Morgenstern. If I, Nerissa Nields, were to actually do this step, I'd be so evolved and productive that I would probably not be writing this blog, having realized that it's impossible to both maintain a blog and write songs and novels and other books. But I have not planned well, and so here you have this post.

Sermon on Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon at West Cummington Church
May 20, 2012

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby--
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
-Jane Hirshfield, "Late Prayer."

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. And so I created the worlds visible and invisible.” -Islamic saying (c/o Cynthia Bourgeault

)

Matthew 15:21-28

Jesus left that place and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And suddenly out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, 'Lord, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.'23
But he said not a word in answer to her. And his disciples went and pleaded with him, saying, 'Give her what she wants, because she keeps shouting after us.'24
He said in reply, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.'25
But the woman had come up and was bowing low before him. 'Lord,' she said, 'help me.'26
He replied, 'It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs.'27
She retorted, 'Ah yes, Lord; but even little dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters' table.'28
Then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted.' And from that moment her daughter was well again.
***************************************************
Guitar playing is a lot like textual analysis—we each have a different signature, and we each bring to the task our own peculiar point of view. When approaching the text, we see what we want to see. We see what we need to see. There are so many ways of seeing this story. Jung said in our dreams, we are all the characters. Most novelists I know would agree. So with scripture. We are the Canaanite woman asking for what she needs for her daughter, we are the disciples wanting the problem to be solved and we are Jesus, breaking through our own cultural boxes and conceptual barriers.

The more I go along my spiritual journey, the more I read about Jesus, or Krishna or the Buddha for that matter, the more I am convinced that Jesus is a portal to the Point, which is love, which is presence, which is power for the powerless. And as much as I have learned from my many years of studying Buddhism and practicing meditation, from decades of yoga and close reading of the Bhagavhad Gita, Jesus is my portal. At the end of the day, I am a Christian for four reasons.

First of all, I believe in the radical social justice Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry advocating for. Second, Jesus is a healer. I have spoken in the past about the particular healing I’ve witnessed and experienced, and for me this wholeness, this power to make one well now matters more to me than any promises of eternal life.

Third, and woven into and everything warp and weft that Jesus teaches is the concept of the Kingdom of God, which I take to mean a state of consciousness open and welcoming to all. I’ll talk about this more in a moment. But the fourth reason I love Jesus is not that he died for my sins. Patti Smith said, "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine." Well, that’s one of the many things I don’t know about. I respectfully leave questions about eternal life on the altar, along with many other questions I have. Like Iris DeMent, I prefer to let the mystery be. But that particular calculus about original sin and redemption, Jesus as sacrificial lamb never rang true for me. I am much more interested in how Jesus directed us to live today.

I had the good fortune to be raised in a Presbyterian church where it was a matter of course for the minister to work out his doubts up in the pulpit with all of us as witnesses. Jesus’s gospel took us into the inner city where we worked side by side with members of an African American church to learn how to create more possibilities for the young people there. Eternal life versus hellfire and damnation weren’t mentioned.

No, the fourth reason I love Jesus is because I agree with King Missile. Jesus is way cool. I just love the man. Jesus is uniquely and eternally Jesus, just as Johnny is Johnny, Lila is Lila, Tom is Tom and Katryna is Katryna. He is a person and a personality, and I love him, just the way I love those intimate members of my family. I don’t expect this reason to win over any converts, but that’s not really my business. And yet, I do feel passionate these days more than ever, that it’s imperative for Christians like me to make our voices heard loudly and clearly that Jesus called us to love so hugely, so persistently that love can overcome our own prejudices. All of our prejudices.

This passage from Matthew has it all: social justice, healing, Jesus’s huge insight into the meaning of the Kingdom of God, and most of all because in this story of the Canaanite mama, we see Jesus himself change, learn and grow beyond his own prejudices. He evolves! As with Siddartha Gautama, as with our own president, we get to see Jesus’s own spiritual journey.

I was going to talk about how mad I am about the North Carolina vote, but you all are mad about that too, and for us all to be mad together is really no different than what happens in a Bible Belt church where the preacher bashes Obama and cites Leviticus and everyone agrees that abortion and homosexuality are abominations. We’ve had Steve already teach us that the book of Leviticus might be well understood as a documentary explaining animal and agricultural policy in the 5th C BCE. You all know that other references to homosexuality are from the letters of Paul, a passionate, possibly closeted homosexual who was clearly struggling with all sorts of questions about how to create a church in the 1st c.
And yet, my friend Peter Ives, the retired long-time pastor at First Churches in Northampton, a congregational church like this one, says that the world needs people who will take the ancients texts we know as the Bible and rescue them from the hands of the religious right. And as much as I want to rise above the fray and not engage in the dialectic/perpetuate an us/them mentality, I also feel that this is a fight worth having, just as the Canaanite woman thinks it’s worth it to persuade Jesus to heal her daughter.
In researching this text, The traditional Bible Belt interpretation of this passage says that Jesus was cool and noncommittal to the Canaanite mother because he was testing her faith. In this view, Jesus is omniscient, knowing exactly who and what he is, eternal; a judge, watching us to see what we will do. Will we make the right choice? Excellent! Go on and be healed then!

But I think what’s really going on is more interesting than that. I was fortunate to be in the old church one Sunday several years ago, when I got to hear Steve preach on a similar passage in Mark. In the Mark version, she is a Syro-Phoenician mama; either way, these were tribes who were enemies of the Jews in the same way Native American Indians were enemies of the American settlers of the 1800’s. In other words, oppressed people who were at best marginalized and at worst victims of genocide. And Jesus may be blind to this. As the passage begins, he sees this woman as outside the purview of his ministry. IF he sees her at all. And yet, she is willing to reach across a great divide to engage him, and after she succeeds in getting his attention by saying, Yes, you might see me as a dog, but make a place for dogs in your Kingdom of God. Jesus hears this. He grants her request. In the Marcan gospel, he goes further, saying "For that retort, be on your way, the demon has come out of your daughter." She returned home and found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.” (Mk. 7:25-30).

So Jesus is changed, by a radical act of listening and engaging, and doing his own share of reaching across a great cultural divide of class, race, gender and religion. This was way out there for a first century rabbi.

I get that I have to reach across a great divide too, that somehow I have to communicate with people I basically have no dealings with—the religious right. And it’s sad that I have no dealings with them. Like the Jews and the Canaanites, we share a land. We even theoretically share a faith, though at times it’s hard for me to recognize my Jesus in their idea of Christ. If you put a Bible between us, we’d rip it apart; me taking the synoptic gospels, the psalms and the prophets, while they take John, Revelations and the letters of Paul. I'd point out that there are 7 dubious mentions of homosexuality in the Bible while the directive to take care of the poor is mentioned over 300 times. If you removed all the times the Bible mentioned the poor the book would fall apart.

But back to the Canaanite woman. She reminds me of Akhilandeshvari. Akhilandeshvari is a Hindu goddess whose long name means, in typical Sanskrit fashion, “Never Not Broken.” She is the goddess we find when we are in a heap on the floor after a breakup, after a bad diagnosis, after bad news about our child. She comes to us in that place where everything we once knew is lost and we somehow have to scramble to make sense of it all. In some traditions, she rides a crocodile; in others she actually is a crocodile, carrying her children in what my yoga teacher Sara Rose calls the “safest and most dangerous place—her mouth.” And like a crocodile, who destroys its prey not by biting but by whirling it around in the water until it passes out from disorientation, she wants us confused. She wants us so confused that we surrender our tightly held beliefs and have the willingness to try something else. Ironically, the teaching is that in this broken state, we are the most powerful that we’ll ever be. Why? For the same reason Jesus tells us that the rich man will have so much trouble entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Or to quote Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” It is when we are at our most powerless that we have to rely on the power of God. Either that, or shake our fist at God, which might be the same thing. (That’s how my 3 year old functions, at any rate.)

I see Akhilandeshvari in the Canaanite mama, at her wits' end with worry about her little daughter, chasing after this Nazarene, this amazing faith healer and just throwing her ALL into her request. And when Jesus basically likens her to a dog, she retorts right back, Yes I am a dog. And dogs need to be fed too. This is an amazing combination of self-esteem, assertiveness and humility.

I think in this moment, Jesus really gets that his call is to everyone, even the people he had regarded as outsiders or even enemies. Because after this passage, in the Marcan gospel, the very next story is the one about Jesus healing a deaf and dumb person, by spitting on his tongue. Then Jesus sighs, looks up to heaven and says, “ephphatha,” which means, “be opened.” And is he talking to himself here? Hasn’t he been opened by the Canaanite woman? Hasn’t he been whirled around like Akhilandeshvari? And don’t I need to be whirled around and opened up in order to hear you? Don’t I need to be opened in order to speak to you? Don’t I need to be open to love you, all of you? It’s no hardship to love my gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual brothers and sisters. They are my friends, neighbors, employers, fans, family. They are me. I love them as myself, easily, fluidly, with no translation necessary. But how about Rush Limbaugh? How about Cardinal Dolan? How about the voters in North Carolina?

I know that what Jesus keeps pointing me towards is love and forgiveness. Forgive your brother 70 times 7. “You will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you…” (John 15:10, 12). And it is true, in the same way that any law of nature or physics is true: when we love, we are dwelling in the kingdom of heaven, which as I said before I believe Jesus understands to be a state of mind, and not a physical destination or utopia. In the Kingdom of heaven, there is no distinction between God and human, no distinction between human and human. We experience that state every spiritual tradition talks about: Unity. Oneness. Non-dual consciousness. (“The Kingdom of God is within,” Luke 17:21).

I know that when I drop the fight—really truly drop it and let it go and am glad to see it go--I am at peace. Or to borrow from a teaching of my husband Tom: when I can look deeply into your eyes and know, really know, that you are completely fine and well just as you are, I am automatically going to approach you, be with you, communicate with you differently—and better—than if I look at you to see how I can fix what’s wrong, going over you with a fine tooth comb for nits (I know about nits this week.)

But what about the fighting? What about advocating for change? Doesn’t there sometimes need to be struggle—a duel/dual-- in order to get to that place of peace? Is there peace without strife? Can one see white against a white background? That is what I want to get back to. Is there such a thing as holy anger? Does it rattle in my heart like the ruby and the nail and make the same sound? I think the better question is: Do I, like the Canaanite woman, persist (with love) to my enemies? What do I do when I have a friend with whom I respectfully disagree? Usually, I smile and nod and let her go on her way. Who am I to annoy her with my different opinion? The Buddha says, “Opinions just go around bothering other people.” But Jesus overturned the money tables. He came to overturn the societal apple cart for sure. He spoke truth to power, over and over again. And yet he went without a fight to the cross. Do I lean too heavily on my passivity when I live and let live? i am so glad that when the church burned down, we didn't passively shrug and go, "Oh well, we still have the parish house." And I have to admit, that's where I was on January 17 2010. This is good enough for me.

It’s not static. None of this is. With God, we don’t get to nail anything to the floor. It’s always a whole new ballgame. Again, this is why I am drawn to Jesus, my human brother who learns from human beings, who witnesses the Canaanite mama model this amazing balancing act of self-esteem and humility. Yes, there’s anger. Yes, there’s struggle. And over and over again, we get shaken by the struggle, rattled to our core, whirled around in the water, twirled around like a dervish. And if we are lucky, if we are open, if we are brave enough to shake our fists at God and demand God’s attention, it breaks open. We break open. Our hearts break and the love comes pouring out, connecting us to each other. The visible world crumbles like the illusion it always was and something shiny catches our inner eye. We see ourselves in the other. We see the other as ourselves. Not "as much as" ourselves, but AS ourselves. Today, to me, that’s worth it all. That’s the God I worship and follow.