Dzonoqua (Giantess) by Derald Scholar (Coast Salish)

I have written a whole series of poems using the Giantess as an image for my soul mentor.

You can see examples: a poem here; a piece of flash fiction here.

I seem not to have written any in 2011, but Peter and I visited Haida G’waii (Queen Charlotte Islands), and I learned in a dream that is where she lives: at K’uuna Llnagaay, which we call Skedans.

Aeriel view of K'uuna Llnagaay, which we call Skedans

This morning I woke up from another dream and wrote this poem:

Out of the Cave

 I followed the Giantess to Haida G’waii,

and it was there among the ruins

of old Skedans

she stepped out of the shadows

into the light of a leaning

mortuary pole–carved Raven

wings extended over the dead, his

head lifted in a frozen cry–

even the Giantess looked small

under the spread

of World Ender’s wings.

But she beckoned to me

and let me stand with my back

against her sun–warmed fur,

both of us gazing that

empty, time-has-stopped

gaze across that famous cove

where so many had paused to ask

permission to come ashore,

paddles raised, voices

calling and answering in a rhythm

tendered by the wind.

Now that I’m older,

now that I know how to find her

in the great dreams of Haida G’waii

that visit me,

I lean into her more,

I am less afraid of her animal face.

More and more often when I turn

to see my shadow on the bridge,

I see her hulking shape, like a bear

or an old dark–faced mountain gorilla,

her rounded back, her strong legs.

She is near now. Sometimes,

when I awake early,

I realize that my last exhale

before waking

was in her breath.

Eagle Pole at Skedans

Haida Raven Pole in Ketchikan, Alaska

Raven Shaman by Peter's teacher, Tsunguni, Chief, Lelooska Tribe Kwakwakawak

Click here for a podcast of me reading this poem out loud. You can listen and read at the same time: Glory

Have You Known Glory?

I am she who has known glory–

I have walked into the late autumn woods

and known the color of the yellow larch

as it burned my turned-up face to cadmium fire.

Wenatchee State Forest, autumn larch in full autumnal glory (Image: justinreznickblog.wordpress.com)

If you want to know glory, follow me down the wayside seep,

springfed stream, hidden caves,

secret shrine, and there dwarf monkeyflowers

murmur their improvisations

in scarlet freckles and gold.

The brilliant yellow blossoms of Monkey Flower are a striking contrast to the steam and colors of a hot spring in Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone (Image: http://naturalsciences.org/microsites/education/Yellowstone/2008/pages/021C_Monkey%20flowers%20near%20hot%20spring.html)

I have followed the path of glory

down the steep black beach

crazy loud with storm surged surf

back-lit by a bloody sun setting hard

as a purie agate into the green-flushed sea.

I have followed the path of glory...

down steep black beach crazy loud with storm surged surf at Bob Beach

High surf at Bob Beach

All my life I’ve sought out glory,

confounded by the flights of common birds:

sparrow and robin, kingfisher and crow–

Last week, I saw it in the flock of rising

blackbirds, doubled and redoubled

in the silver flashing mirror of the wetlands.

Blackbirds flock up to make messages in the sunset sky (Image: http://www.insightintonature.com/pages/blog.html?y=2010&m=12)

Glory among the caramel scented Ponderosa pines

Glory among the million little brown bats generating heat beneath the bridge ...(Image: moonbattery.com)

Glory among the captive koi... (Image: aero-garden.us)

and the fish ladder journeys of Chinook-- (Image:peculiarvacation.blogspot.com)

glory pours out worlds from the tiny yellow spider on my arm trailing its parachute of airy gauze–(Image: krisgironella.wordpress.com)

your quick whisper

behind me on the trail

that makes me turn around

with a secret smile.

July 19, 2011

What about you? Have you known glory?

I once saw a goshawk flashing quick, dark and silent as a shark through the branches.

When I was a child, I used to ride in my dad’s backpack. That’s how I first learned the rhythms of walking. As he walked under the old-growth red cedar canopy, I’d hang onto my Dad’s shirt collar, then lean my head way back, so I could see up into the great treetops swimming and swaying like a kelp forest. I once saw a goshawk flashing quick, dark and silent as a shark through the branches.

In the evening, Mom would stand me up in her metal washbasin for a little bath by firelight. By the time she had towelled me off and gotten me into my pajamas, I was too sleepy to stand up. Daddy slung me over his shoulder and carried me to the big green family-sized tent. I was awake briefly, but the sound of nearby creek water talking to itself and the stars soon pulled me under. In those days, I was a child and always dreamed.

Map of the Remembered World

2. Sparrow

These sounds were so terrifying that I flew out of my body and perched like a sparrow on the gable of our house.

When I was a child, I was often confronted and confounded by the mysterious other world of adults. When I was about three years old, we lived way north of Seattle  in a little shingle-sided house at the edge of the swamp. One day, I heard a terrible noise and ran out onto the stoop to listen. I could hear dogs down in the swamp below the house. I could hear men shouting as they chased after the dogs. I could hear an additional sound–a human scream. These sounds were so terrifying that I flew out of my body and perched like a sparrow on the gable of our house. I could see my frozen body below me in a red dress, long dark ringlets standing out from my head in fear.

Self Portrait as Owl Woman: "long dark ringlets standing out from my head in fear."

3. Secrets

When I was a child in the same house, I first became aware my father had lived another life before me and my siblings. Under the gable was an attic that was accessed by set of pulldown stairs. The string hung in the hallway next to another string that turned on the hall light.

One day, Mom pulled the string and the stairs magically unfolded from the ceiling. She went about her business, and I was allowed to explore the attic. I first looked out the tiny dusty gable window down into the swamp, then I squatted on my heels to investigate a metal box. It took me a moment to navigate the latch, but then I opened the lid. I found inside metal pins and colorful ribbons, things for which I had no name but I know now were two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, a Sharpshooters Medal and other relics of a soldier’s life.

I carefully closed the box and hugged it to me as I negotiated the wobbly stairs. Mom was ironing in the living room. I ran in, holding out the box of medals, shouting, “Look what I found!”

Mom snatched the box out of my hands saying, “Don’t ever mention these to your father!” She hustled the box back up into the attic then snapped the string to flip the stairs back up out of sight.

I never mentioned the medals to my father, and he never mentioned them to me. World War II is long over, my father long gone, the medals destroyed when my brother’s house burned down, and all this happened long ago when I was a child.

4. The Lookout

Once when I was a young girl, I rode my horse Lance far up into the foothills above our home in the wide curve of the Wenatchee River. I rode so high up and so far away that the trees became a dense forest and snow still drifted thick on north slopes. I entered sunny clearings where spring beauty and avalanche lilies bloomed, then the dark branches would close in around me and Lance and snow dropped down on his haunches.

Although I became disoriented in this confusing landscape of trees and snow, Lance knew where we were, and he finally took his head. He found a logging road that led to another road that led down through the Barnhill’s property to the three miles of switchbacks down to river level. It was late. The night was dark, the Milky Way rich and creamy with stars.

Home After Dark: Original Watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long

Far below, I saw a car begin the slow crawl up the switchbacks toward us, headlights appearing and disappearing around the steep curves. Lance and I plodded on, finally coming down that stretch of road to what we called The Lookout. The car was parked there, and I could see my dad looking out over the silvery thread of river below. As we appeared, he came out and patted Lance on the shoulder, letting the big horse snuffle his shirt.

When I Was a Child: Mandala of River, Cliff, Orchard, Mountains

“Good ride?” was all he said, with never a word of worry or a hint, as I learned later, that he was out looking for me. No shame, no blame, the best lesson in the world, and I learned it long ago from my father when I was a young girl.

5. Dreams

Ever since I was a young woman, I have dreamed of my father over and over and over–I’ve written all the dreams down, but still they come. In these dreams, Daddy never speaks to me–I see him across a piazza in Florence; entering a  museum; ahead of me on a mountain trail; in a crowd watching me perform.

Dreams of my Father: From my Illustrated Journal

Sometimes I dream he has returned home to Mom, pale and weak as the ghost of a soldier killed in war, and only she can tend to him. I stand outside death’s door, looking in at my beautiful father.

A flotilla of Mallard ducklings sets forth on Delta Ponds in search of life's little lessons

Mallard Mom sees the glowing red orb from a distance and heads toward it, long before its neon pulse pulls my binoculars to scan the beach beneath me.

She is paddling intently across the dark pond toward it/me. She is mottled brown with a dark brown stripe through her eye. Her wings flash a violet-blue speculum bordered front and behind by a pronounced white stripe.

Then I see her little ones–six fuzzy dark balls of billed fluff swimming furiously with their tiny legs to stay in a tight formation behind her. She’s headed for the bright red object on the beach at her own adult speed and doesn’t slow down for her ducklings–it’s up to them to keep up.

They are brand-new to the world of Delta Ponds, born yesterday after 26 days of incubation. Six tiny heads are packed in so tightly behind Mom that they can’t possibly see over her to the beckoning beacon of ruby promise.

When the flotilla hauls up on shore, I turn my binoculars on the seductive item of Mom’s desire. It looks like a fisherman’s red bobber or a giant marble cleary, but I see now it is really an enormous red strawberry, dead ripe, its flesh unbroken. Some picnicker has spread a lunch here where I’m standing and lost a precious jewel of a fruit.

Somehow, Mom knew all about the strawberry the second she spotted it and towed her raft of struggling youngsters across the width of the pond.

But she doesn’t eat it herself. She nudges it with her bill, then wanders off and acts disinterested. The kids have gotten the idea, though, and one by one they stagger across the gravel to give it a nudge with their bills. This takes a while because walking is obviously a fairly new concept. There are frequent falls and tumblings-together as they take turns investigating the strawberry, which is as big as one of their heads.

Duckling's eye view of a strawberry--a challenging wall of red

Finally, one of them–male or female–who knows? seems to stop and think the physics through. As a teacher, I know that the quality of curiosity is going to make one of the flock suddenly become an interesting individual.

One of the flock is about become an interesting individual.

Sure enough, that anonymous but singular duckling gives the strawberry a longer look than any one of them has so far.  He or she wedges a bill  between the ground and the wall of imposing red and gives the berry a flip.

The berry rolls over, revealing a sliced facet of fruit oozing red drops of juice. “Oh-ho!” I say to myself, “I see that is a local strawberry, not one of those imported white-centered robo-berries!” My clever duckling dives into the feast and has it half-eaten before anyone else catches on.

Mom just watches. She laid before the ducklings a shiny red problem complete with difficulty level, promise, and reward. She gave one hint, that first nudge, and one hint only.

Sometimes I take a bright red thought and put it in front of my students. I nudge it a bit, then step back to see who will be the first to solve the puzzle.

I like thinking I’m as smart as a duck.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm smart as a duck?

Your Guest Blogger is Peter Jensen with photography and a sonnet slideshow from our May 1, 2011 trip to Sweet Creek, Oregon.

As for Blake’s happiness–a man who knew him said: “If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.”

And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. …He burned most of his own work. Because he said, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”

…He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ”
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

March 21, 2011
I love stories about serendipity because it forces me to “think out of the box.” Here’s another one I stumbled across for my collection!

Emilio Estevez got writer’s block while writing the script for Bobby (2006), so his brother, Charlie Sheen suggested he change his surroundings. Estevez drove about 150 miles north of Los Angeles and randomly chose a motel to spend the night. While talking about his project with the woman working the front desk, she revealed she was actually in the ballroom the night Robert Kennedy was shot.
Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/bio

Read an extended review of Strange Piece of Paradise in The New York Times here.

Access the website for the book here.

Years later, Jentz reconstructs not only the crime scene, but the social structure of Redmond, the changing and unchanging attitudes toward women, and oh by the way, fingers her would-be assassin. She documents as well what I would call the more shamanic signs of a shadow world that seems to be listening in and perhaps even guiding her determined quest, which relies so much upon happenstance and quirky connections.

She notes the axeman on top of Oregon’s State Capitol building (The Golden Pioneer), follows a random license plate that says “Axeman” to a clue. Jenz gathers dozens of ways the dream life of the investigation speaks to her. What I love is that these details flow in and around the quest narrative, supporting and strengthening it in a web of shadowy allusion. Yet she is never overt; Jentz understands that synchronicity is not to be looked directly in the eye: the shamanic world speaks from the margins.

Damn, I love that book! I think I’ll read it again for the sixth time. (Guilty Admission: I’m a re-reader–are you?)

Strange Piece of Paradise

Where I was going with this–I have been wondering in a creative sort of way what writing project to turn my attention to next. I have an unfinished manuscript of mixed poetry and prose called Giantess. In it, I search for, find, and accompany a figure who is very familiar to us here in the Northwest. She has various tribal names, such as Wild Woman of the Woods and Timber Giant and Dzonoquah (variant spellings).

Her myths underlie the local legends as Sasquatch, a word that is derived from some variant of Dzonoquah. She is the source of the Chief’s wealth in cedar, fur, and coppers. She watches over young women’s puberty rites. She is used to scare kids into not wandering into the forest; the Old Ones say she pops errant children into her burden basket and takes them to her forest home for dinner. Only resourceful and brave children discover ways to outwit her.

Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture

Dzonoquah has always fascinated me, and so we “write together.”

But not for a long time. The past has intervened as a theme, and her project receded. I forgot about it for long periods of time.

So. Anyway. Where I am going is…

On Monday in my Poetry Writing class, I handed out Haikubes that my friend Jody Blechman sent me out of the blue. They are thick, chunky, smooth cubes with evocative poetry words on them like “peach,” “shadow,” “putrid,” and “incandescent.” (I made that last one up–it’s too long to fit on the cube.) The idea is to create three line haiku out of them, but it’s not much of a jump to “Snow Day, please” or “No free lunch.” There are sixty-one cubes, and I randomly gave each student four cubes, leaving three at the bottom of the box for me. They were:

JOURNEY

GRACE

GIANT

Freaked me out. I consider this gratuitous commentary from the peanut gallery of some parallel universe. Jentz would say to me, “My point, exactly!”

We poetry students fed our Haikube words like dry leaves to the bonfire of the blazing moment and wrote our poems in smoke on the sky. The Giantess stepped forward and spoke to me about the journey toward grace I have embarked upon:

My journey into grace began
while the Giantess slept.
Vines tangles by moonlight
as I followed the old plank steps
into the green spiral vortex.
I had thought to follow this path blindfolded,
arms outstretched to either side, face
tuned to the turning breath.
I am surprised by vision,
the way rain
washes out the path.

When I came to the suspension bridge,
the river roared like a waking bear
between gorge walls.
Broken vines and swinging slats
spider-webbed the catwalk away.
This is lost
this hovering in cataract mist
sunshot with broken rainbows
seeking my next slippery
handhold, knowing
there is a Giantess
waking in the far North, slowly
remembering my name.

–Sandy Brown Jensen

A special thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read this blog and to comment on it with insight and compassion. There is no other reason to do it!

Morning Journal Entry: I am feeling both hopeful and discouraged. To be on the recovering end of an illness is always hopeful; I should know as this is the third time in two months: three distinctly different viruses, one bacterial infection, one piriformus tear.

However, the glorious morning sun is shining in my eyes, and there is the universal symbol of hope. Except it is not a symbol; it is the real sun:

As long as I feel the fresh breeze in my hair,

and see the sun shining strong on the leaves,

I will not ask for more.

What better thing could destiny grant me?

Other than the sensual passing of life in moments

of ignorance such as this one?

–Ricardo Reis (herteronym of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa)Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems

I don’t wish to speak about that which is discouraging, but it has to do with the pull in me between the image (painting) and the word (poetry and writing). I don’t want the urgency to write to slip away from me, but I have felt that happening since the New Year’s party for John Gray. All my urgency and complexity and interest in writing was centered in the past. Now, the past seems resolved in some way. I don’t have any new substance to draw on, and the past slips further and further away.

I have two articles still coming out this Spring, but the writing of them, so absorbing at the time, seems to have been written by a different person.

The Communal Studies Association and Communities Magazine (oh, by the way, as I link that magazine title, I notice the new issue is not only out with my article, but that my sister Cheryl Renee Long did the cover art–wahoo! We didn’t know that was coming down the line…) no longer engage me intellectually or emotionally–it all seems to have slip/slid away.

Besides being sick a lot, I have been painting a lot. My interest in painting is not to be good (professional, shown, etc.) but to be expressive. I follow my wandering muse through the world of dream and nightmare, color and form, horizon, grid, and spiral.

I follow my wandering muse through the world of dream and nightmare

color and form, horizon...

I no longer have any faith in my poetry. Part of me believes I have failed to be “good enough.” Another part has noted the Calyx competition has opened and is wondering if my Giantess manuscript is complete enough, or if it could be? I may be delusional. Agate Eyes. I loved writing that book.

I have no ambition nor desires.

To be a poet is not my ambition.

It’s simply my way of being alone.

–Alberto Caeiro, “The Keeper of the Herds” (one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms)

Poems of Fernando Pessoa

My passion (read: available energy) currently seems to be going into my teaching and blogging–although I feel I have been sick for so much of this quarter I haven’t blogged enough. Every time I get a new idea, I seem to go down with the Virus-of-the-Week. Nonetheless, today, I feel calm. Today, I feel mystified. Today, I feel ready for a new idea.

I am nothing.

I will never be anything.

I cannot wish to be anything.

Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

–Alvaro de Campos “The Tobacco Shop” (heteronym of Fernando Pessoa)

A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)