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.

House Like a Wheel (apologies to Anna McGarrigle)

What if a house were like a wheel?
How would that be any different from the way things are?
Your days would begin level enough
But then as the sun rose, imperceptibly
(Except for that one moment--which
You only catch on the rare days
When you are actually paying
attention--when the blushing dawn
quite suddenly turns the lights on),
as the day goes on
the shift.

Regularly, as you look up,
you notice that you're turning,
And it's even quite pleasant at first
Maybe it's just a gentle rocking,
and the pendulum will swing back the other way.
(Surely it will swing back, won't it?)

You rest in this denial,
Or rather, you think you are resting,
Until the dishes have crashed to the floor
And the laundry escapes its confines
in the dryer
and is replicating its experience
all over the bedrooms.

What Does The Fox Say?

What does the fox say?
"I'm gonna get you!"
What does the rabbit say?
"No you won't. I'm too fast."
What does the tiger say?
"No matter how much I eat, I am always hungry."
What does the lion say?
"It's lonely at the top."
What does the Queen say?"
"I'm so tired of taking care of everyone. When will someone take care of me?"
What does the King say?
"Mistakes were made."
What does the deer say?
" ."

By Nerissa and Johnny Nields-Duffy
Nov. 2011

Beauty

The last time I saw you
You were the girl next door and
I was the town Bohemian
I'd pegged you for a beauty queen
And I was right.
But I could not see your real beauty.

The last time I saw you
I wore a fat suit
That was more than a joke
Less than a lark
Intended to be
A slight of hand
Instead
A slide on a banana peel
My destiny, not yours
To spend the rest of my life
Walking with care
Not to slip again.

You gave me a voice
You gave me a hand
You ringed me in
You championed me

She did too, but in a different way.

She came in sideways, through the side door
So sweetly goofy
I couldn't possibly deny her.
Like a puppy who decides who her owner is
She chose me and I let her.

And then she began to work on me.
"That beauty queen, that beauty queen
I do not like that beauty queen.
Look, how our skin turns green
When we stand beside her.
She says she wants to be your friend
But to what end? It can't be real.
You and I should make a deal
Agree to walk right off the field."

And so I did. I walked right off,
But she didn't follow.

This straight I have visited before.
Each time I leap to capture the disc
they cheer, and I feel complete,
(Perhaps the way you did at the beauty contest?)
But presently I live in fear of losing it.
I grip it ever more tightly in my hands.
And what good is a discus unless you toss it?

So I am back on the field.
Now I will play.
Now I will sing with you.
Now I will leave behind the voices
--and let's face it, they are my own--
that leer at beauty
that do not trust it
That can not see it reflected in themselves.

I should never have been envious of you.
Your beauty was my beauty
As the rose lifts us all up
As we lose ourselves in its gaze.

Finding God

It used to be
The way to God
Was up a tree
Feeling the bark against
New palms
Hoisting torso
Over limbs
Spread eagle
At the top
Swaying in the breeze
Nearer to Thee.

Now I find You
As I sweep the floor
In this crumb
In that tumbleweed
In the careful collecting
Of all the debris
I cup my palm around my cull
And carry it to the compost pile
Where it will find its way in again.
We always do.
Nerissa Nields
Nov. 16, 2011

The Last Time You Were Here

The last time you were here
You were driving on highway five in California
Trying not to smell the cities of cattle
Fetid and groaning with institutional dharma.
He was riding shotgun
And you wanted him clean of it.
“Look over here,” you said, pointing to the birds, to the west, to the ocean.
But he turned and saw
And you could not offer an explanation.

You stopped in a small town
Hoping the flowers would distract him.
You found a salon and got a hair cut
Which made you look like your sister.
You left the hair on the cutting room floor.

Over lunch, you told him about the time
You were on the fifty-first floor
Washing your hands at a sink
This was when you were in a wheelchair
The bathroom had no walls
And the drop was a roll of the dice away.
He said, “You were lucky. But why do you take such risks? Stay here next time.“
And later, after mouths full of chicken cooked in wine with artichokes and olives,
“Did you save your hair? It’s good luck to save your hair.”
You kissed him goodbye and got back into the car and kept driving south
Cresting a hill, there was the snow shimmering off the mountain
Larger than life
Larger than Hollywood
So large it might be all a dream
Or a film
Or the afterlife
And you turned around, back to town,
To convince him to come with you,
That this time it didn’t have anything to do with luck.

Nerissa Nields
November 14, 2012

October Snowstorm

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

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

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



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


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

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


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




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



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

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

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

The Coat

As I have written previously, I made a vow last December to make peace with money. I decided to let the ways in which I interact with the currency of currency be my spiritual teacher and to let it show me the ways in which I am still contracted and fearful and doubtful--and maybe even a little self-depriving. I wanted to do this because I was spending $1400 a month on groceries on the one hand, and on the other, unable to sleep at night because I was so worried about how my kids would go to college. Also I don't know how to balance a checkbook. And even though I am richly blessed with resources, I can't seem to control the mechanism that begins in my brain ("I need a yogurt maker") and ends with non-appropriate purchases (e.g. spending the money on pretty journals instead, which I add to the huge collection of pretty journals sitting on a stack in my office.) I have never been able to do numbers. I can remember your birthday if you tell it to me, and I will probably remember it even if I haven't seen you for 20 years, or at least I'll pin the tail a few days around your birthday. I remember the names of kids I teach and kids I taught twenty-five years ago. But if you tell me a series of numbers--the amount I have in my bank account, for instance--I will forget it ten seconds afterwards.


I started by just keeping track of every penny I spent and every penny I earned. In order to do this, I had to be present a lot, which was hard. I much prefer to zone out and kind of float about in my daily routines. I had to remember to pull out a little notebook every time I went through the grocery line, which wasn't that hard except that I forgot to do this every other trip. Even harder was tracking the quarters and dimes that go to feed the meter when I parked the car. I wrote down what we spent, and I noticed quickly that we consistently spent a little more than we earned. Not an egregious amount, but enough so that it would affect us if we wanted to save money for our kids to go to college. And I was not happy about this. It gave me the feeling of being porous; not like a sea sponge where water flows in and out with equilibrium, but like a coat with holes in the pockets whose owner is blithely dropping coins into its slippery interior. Clink, clink, clink.

As a veteran dieter, I knew that the solution would have to be more than making a budget. I knew that if I tried to adhere to something like that, I would just feel deprived and act out. I knew that I had to change the way I interacted with money. So I started by saying thank you each time I touched the stuff, even if the "touch" was digital. Thank you. I get it. You are taking care of me. Thank you. I asked for help from some friends who understand this kind of powerlessness and got some great advice. It's the same advice your grandmother probably gave you: Save up for what you want. It will taste sweeter if you do.

By the way, do you know what the interests rates on savings accounts are? Like, NOTHING. I was banking at Bank of America and when I asked to open a savings account, and inqired about compound interest (see, I knew to ask about compound interest) they said, "Point oh five." "Like, five cents on the dollar?" I asked. "Nooooooo," my rep said, shaking his head and looking at me as if I were a child. "Zero point zero five." "So," I said. "No one really wants us to save our money anymore, right? They'd prefer if we contributed to the GDP. That's cool. But I need to save my money so my kids can go to college."

So after some more good advice, I moved my money from that bad bank to Florence Savings Bank where they give you 1.25% if you cross your Ts and dot your i's on a number of items. As the months passed, I created a spending plan rather than a budget. I saved for college, and I saved for things I wanted, like a white Irish Fisherman sweater (I know, I posted about this three years ago, and I still am searching for the perfect one.) And I saved my money until one day, Saturday, I had enough to go shopping. I was sweater-bound--a dark purple cardigan might suffice if I couldn't find the fisherman sweater, and we were scheduled to have a break right down the street from Anthropologie, my favorite store. As I was leaving for my gig at Passim, the kids said, "Mama, pleeeeeease bring us back a present." Guess what? I had even saved enough for that kind of spontaneous treat for my kids.

Our gigs at Passim were so much fun. At the family show in the afternoon, we did "Aikendrum" and as we sang, Katryna drew an Aikendrum and clothed him in the foods the kids suggested. We sang "Wise Mama Witch," our new Halloween chant, and we got our publisher Jonathan Greene to play banjo with us on "Old Joan Clark."

Afterwards, in between shows, Katryna and I went off to spend my savings. Now I should say that part of my goal is to learn to be a good shopper. To buy, for instance, the yogurt maker rather than the journals if that is indeed my need. (Some days I really do need journals, and on those days, it would be better if I got one, rather than a yogurt maker. But, see, I do need to be conscious about these things.) Anyway, I'd left the house at noon when it was in the low sixties and I'd forgotten a coat. Now it was in the high forties and I was feeling it. We ducked into my favorite store and poked around. I tried on a bunch of ugly sweaters. Katryna found adorable mugs with my kids' initials on them. Each mug had a hip piece of thin twine wrapped around the handle attached to a green crayon. Perfect! And as I was sighing, giving up on my sweater search, I looked up and saw a magnificent parka complete with a leonine faux fur stole around the hood and fleecy lining. The coat said, "Nerissa, take me. I am your heart's desire. I fit and I will keep you warm."

"But I have a coat!" I protested. "In fact, I have several. I need a sweater."

"No," pronounced the coat. "You have a dorky dirty yellow parka that embarrasses your husband. You have your grandmother's boring green coat that looks like an old lady coat. I am hip and beautiful. And face it, all anyone ever sees of you in the wintertime is your coat. You never take it off because you're always freezing, even indoors. Buy me, and I will be your complete fashion statement. When you think of it that way, I am a bargain."

Indeed I had to think of it that way in order to apply the word 'bargain' to that coat, but this line of argument worked. Plus I was cold. As I left the store hurrying back to my second show of the night, I felt so warm, so taken care of, as if God were putting Her arm around my shoulder.

Presently, though I began to feel guilty. "What was I thinking?" I thought. "I don't need a coat! And this coat is expensive! And I am supposed to be living within my means! That is a coat for someone who has money to throw around! I just blew my sweater money! Now I will have to wait a whole other year for a fisherman sweater! I am supposed to be buying only what I really need! I am supposed to be patiently waiting for the perfect items that make my heart sing! I am supposed to visualize what I want and trust that it will manifest, and not to impulsively buy furry parkas!"

I wondered if I could return it. I doubted if it would even be warm enough for January winds.

The next morning, I set the bag with the wrapped mugs outside the kids' room. When Elle came shuffling down the stairs wrapped in her blanket, I scooped her up and bounded with her in my arms up the stairs, with Jay following close behind. "Come open your presents!" I shouted, grabbing the bag and running down the stairs again. The kids squealed and exclaimed and bounced after me, grabbing at the bag with the wrapped items. They each unwrapped a mug. Elle pulled at the crayon and said, "I don't like green," and started to cry. Jay said, "I don't wike gween eiddur," and started to fake cry. I frowned, swept up the mugs with great dignity and muttered something about gratitude. I felt completely deflated and even worse about my spending spree. I wondered if I could wrap up everything and ship it back to Cambridge and get my money back.


And so as I was muttering on Sunday morning about gratitude, while my kids wailed in frustrated disappointment, it hit me. We don't get to choose our gifts. That's the point of a gift. They get given to us. What if that coat really was a gift from God? What if I am never ever going to learn how to be an effective shopper who holds out and waits years for the item of my dreams? What if I never find the perfect Fisherman sweater? Maybe I really do need more pretty journals, and the yogurt maker can wait. Isn't it the truth that every single best thing/person/job/experience I've ever had has been way better and more interesting than my dream for it? Hasn't it all been a co-creation with the Divine rather than me bossing It around to match up to my vision? Don't I, too, cry with disappointment when first confronted with the "wrong" item?

I turned around from the sink. Elle said, "I really like the mug, Mama. I just don't like the crayon. Hey! What if we attach a blue crayon to the handle?" A moment later, we'd replaced the green crayons with a blue one for Elle and a purply-pink one for Jay. They spooned some marbles into their new mugs and pretended they were eating them as soup. Shyly, I showed Tom my new coat.

"Wow!" he said, nodding. "It's about time you got yourself a really nice coat. You deserve it."