Archive for the ‘Blogs and shorts’ Category
Cindy on May 28th, 2010
The windows of my soul I throw wide open to the sun.” — John Greenleaf Whittier
Dear Friends,
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I spend less time hanging out here in the Home Office when it’s warm outside. The laptop stays indoors and I don’t.
In summer, I try to limit my time online to less than an hour daily, mainly to check e-mail for work-related issues. (I still work on other writing projects year ’round.) This officially qualifies me as a fair-weather blogger, I know. Not only does summer coax me out to my garden and the bike trails, it also brings more opportunities to work as a background extra in films. (So far, I have four bookings for shoots in June and July.)
But I won’t disappear completely. While I’m cutting back to three posts per month this summer, I still want to share some things with you. For starters, I have permission to share an excerpt of my new garden essay that ran exclusively in Victoria magazine. And since a couple of my essays are included in some brand-new story collections, I’ll plug the books when they’re available. Come Father’s Day, I’ll run a favorite Daily Tribune column about my dad and a special photo taken on Father’s Day before he died in 1992. And later, I’ll post a photo essay featuring one of my crazier passions — garden junk!
Meanwhile, if you enjoy the short essays I typically feature here, I hope you’ll track down a copy of Writing Home in bookstores or on Amazon. I’ll miss you, and would love it if you’d stop by to say hello. But I’ll understand if you can’t. I hope you’ll be outside in the sunshine, too, taking a break to read a novel in your lawn chair, or pausing to admire what’s growing in your own garden. Warmest wishes for a happy summer, Cindy
P.S. Look for my monthly “Somewhere in the Middle” column at Michigan Women’s Forum — and watch for a special giveaway at the end of May.
– Photos (copyright 2010 by Cindy La Ferle) were taken last year in my garden. –
Cindy on May 24th, 2010
If you search the world for happiness, you may find it in the end, for the world is round and will lead you back to your door. ~Robert Brault
A blogger pal recently introduced me to the happy list. Like a gratitude list, a happy list cheers you when you’re in a funk. But unlike a gratitude list, a happy list isn’t supposed to include major events or life-affirming essentials like a close family, work you enjoy, lifelong friends, or a negative biopsy result. No, a happy list is all about simple pleasures, cheap thrills, little luxuries.
A happy list can be scribbled in no particular order. Happiness usually shows up randomly and in places where we least expect it — so let your own happy list reflect that.
As Ben Franklin wrote, “Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.” I’ve edited my list down to a few highlights — and I look forward to reading some of yours. — CL
*A stack of new books and a pending beach vacation
*A great haircut that lasts for more than four weeks (thank you, Patti!)
*Hearing my husband play his guitar while I write in my office
*Leon & Lulu, a gift shop with a sense of humor in Clawson
*A bag of pretzel nuggets from the local Dollar Store
*The text message from my traveling son that reads: “Just landed safely in Chicago” (… or Toronto or Little Rock or …)
*Dressing up and heading out to dinner with my husband, midweek, without the crowds and long lines
*Donna’s savory Greek salad and grilled garlic pita bread at Niki’s, my all-time favorite local diner
*The effortless ease of ballet flats, anytime
*Sunsets on Lake Michigan
*A free hour and a book of Billy Collins’ poetry
*Picking fresh herbs from my own salad garden while the cats look on … there’s catnip in that garden, too
*Finding an extra quarter for the parking meter in the bottom of my purse when I’m in downtown Royal Oak
*Paul Simon singing “Graceland”
*Silver jewelry coming clean while I polish it
*Feeling at home in my skin, no matter where I am
*Reading fashion magazines on the beach — the only time I have time for them
*The sparkle of crystal chandeliers
*Re-reading the first chapter of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine the first week of summer
*Shopping at the flea market and finding exactly what I need for an art project
*Hearing pride in the voices of my students when they read their writing aloud
*The cheery scents of citrus and lemon and grapefruit
*Unexpected thank-you notes
*Freshly laundered white sheets and ironed pillowcases
*Finding the perfect cards for my best friends at a card shop
*Shopping for groceries at Trader Joe’s, because the food is fun and so are the people who work there
*Long, rambling bike rides with no particular destination
*Unlimited free time in the aisles of a well-stocked garden center
*The first glimpse of my home when I’m returning from a vacation
– Random happiness photos by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on May 13th, 2010
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination.” — Mary Oliver
“Wild Geese” is another favorite by our old friend Mary Oliver, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry we’ve explored in previous posts. Listening to Anne Lamott’s Word by Word, an audio CD on creative writing, I learned that Lamott posted this poem near her desk — and advises all writers and artists to do the same.
“Wild Geese” touched a tender place in my soul. Like so many friends of mine, I was taught as a child to obey the edicts of the organized religion my family practiced. I was terrified of making mistakes — and terrified of disappointing a punitive, unforgiving God. (Not to mention disappointing my parents and teachers.) No matter how “good” I was, or how closely I followed the rules and colored within the lines, I still felt unworthy. A nasty inner critic took up residence inside my head, too, sitting right next to the punitive God.
Today, I follow a strong code of ethics and my own faith, but no longer allow fear to constrict my life or narrow my view. As Mary Oliver reminds me, we were all made to shine our creative light, and to dance freely in this gorgeous world of ours. — CL
Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
– Reprinted from Owls and Other Fantasies, by Mary Oliver; Beacon Press; 2003.
Cindy on May 9th, 2010
When you have raised kids, there are memories you store directly in your tear ducts.” — Robert Brault
Today’s essay first appeared on Mother’s Day 2004 in my Sunday column in The Daily Tribune of Royal Oak. At the time, my son and his longtime friends, a.k.a. “The Crew,” were preparing to graduate from high school. This piece is dear to my heart, so I’m sharing it with all of you in celebration of Mother’s Day. — CL
All My Children
When people ask me how many kids I have, I tell them I’ve lost count. This might sound strange or irresponsible to most parents, but some of you know exactly what I mean.
If, like me, you’re the parent of an only child, you’ve probably invested a lot of time scouting for playmates to foster some pseudo sibling rivalry in your own backyard. To entertain an “only,” you often have to play Pied Piper to the neighborhood kids.
But I look back fondly on the years I made our home kid-friendly and child-proof, and I like to think I became a more patient parent while getting to know and love other people’s children.
So I like to remind all of you younger moms that it’s really worth the effort to host as many playmates as you can. Keeping extra snacks on hand is always a good start. But you also need to lower your standards for house and garden.
One summer, for instance, my son and the neighborhood kids decided to build a fort out of discarded appliance boxes. Raiding parking lots and trash piles, they collected enough scrap metal and cardboard to make our entire yard look like a temporary shelter for Royal Oak’s homeless population. Occupying our property for weeks, the fort was a tribute to inventive teamwork. Still, I was amazed our neighbors never complained about its lack of curb appeal.
Later, in the middle school years, the kids developed a burning interest in chemistry, often using our home as their laboratory. There was the time my son and a buddy decided to make their own paper pulp in the basement, for instance. Using an old 10-speed blender, the boys pulverized newspaper scraps in a perilous base of water and craft glue. One of them forgot to put the top on the blender, and the resulting glop still decorates half of the basement ceiling.
Our home was also frequently chosen as a location for school video projects. I don’t recall where the kids obtained all the pyrotechnics they used for special effects, but the final footage was typically awesome. One year, after the crew filmed Macbeth for an English lit class, I spent several days picking melted candle wax from the Oriental carpet in the hallway.
Believe it or not, I’m really going to miss all of this. As the old cliche goes, kids grow up way too fast. By the time you’ve finally figured out how to spell baccalaureate, they are packing for college and you’re praying they’ll come back to mess up your house all over again.
Next Sunday I’ll be watching the graduation ceremony for Shrine Catholic High School’s Class of 2004. There will be tears and accolades and promises to keep in touch. There will be words of gratitude for teachers and school administrators — and for all the parents who created a real extended family for these kids.
Decked in cap and gown, my son will pose for photographs with the talented young people who have graced the past thirteen years of his life. I will add these to our family albums, which are already bursting with earlier photos of the same kids dressed up for Heritage Day, bike parades, Halloween contests, prom nights, and homecoming dances.
I’ve also kept a nostalgic stash of notes from these youngsters. Some are thank-you cards for special gifts, impromptu field trips, or birthday parties. There’s even a heartfelt letter of apology for the spilled candle wax from Lady Macbeth. Re-reading these notes never fails to touch me, and I couldn’t be more proud.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I’ve never doubted this maxim. But I have also grown to believe it takes a village to raise a mother. — Cindy La Ferle
___________________
Originally published on Mother’s Day 2004 in The Daily Tribune of Royal Oak, this essay was reprinted in Hometown America (Ideals/Guideposts; 2008) and is included in my own collection of essays, Writing Home.
Top photo: “The Crew” dressed for senior prom, posing on our front porch in 2004. My son is the tall guy, second from left. Bottom photo: “The Crew” at a summer BBQ in 2008, after college graduation.
Cindy on May 6th, 2010
Poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us.” — Sheila Bender
I was lucky enough to meet Sheila Bender early in my writing career. In two days I devoured her writing guide, Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, then wrote to tell her how much it inspired me. To my surprise, she contacted me when she visited Detroit on business, and we met for lunch.
Seventeen years later, Sheila still inspires me. She’s a prolific author, poet, essayist, and master teacher — and I encourage you to visit her online magazine, Writing It Real. I was so deeply moved by her newest book, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, that I invited Sheila to be a guest blogger for the “Poems to Inspire” series this week. — Cindy La Ferle
Guest Blog by Sheila Bender
I started my writing career as a poet and I believe that poetry is my “home page,” the place I return to for investigating my feelings and perceptions and to recognize those of others that are so like my own. As poets, we write from joy, sorrow and wonder; our poems record our responses to being alive and they create a sense living intensely, rather than walking shut down through our days.
Many authors write about the way only poetry, both reading and writing it, has helped them cope with sorrows. Writing, even about the sadness of circumstances, is a kind of celebration of life — the pleasure of images and words to reconstruct even as we must let go.
And that ability to include opposites (something John Keats named “negative capability”) is exactly why poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us. I realized this when I wrote about the loss of my 25-year-old son in a snowboarding accident in A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief.
Madge McKeithen wrote in her book, Blue Peninsula, how certain poems were the guides and solace she needed as she watched her young adult son dying of a terminal disease. Others have turned their attention to the way poetry helps when other therapies and conversations don’t: David Rico in Being True to Life: Poetic Paths to Personal Growth and John Fox in Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making.
Over the years, I have known I would start poems because of seeing the wet outline of my husband’s swimming trunks through his slacks as we drove after arguing, because of attending a traditional tea ceremony with my daughter as she was coming of age and the tea ceremony hostess’ mother was dying, because of awe I felt at the fragility of human life after looking down the Columbia River Gorge with my young son.
I’ve written a poem because a blue moon in August made me sit down and consider the feelings I had when my daughter left for studies in Japan. And certainly, when I was in the deepest grief, it was poetry I called upon to bring my son back to me, to make it impossible for me to forget him, to render pain into some sort of beauty so I could go on and be of service to my family and others.
Usually, I have only the feeling of needing to write and no knowledge of what I will write. But as I write each poem, I begin to understand the poem as a means of finding out what I might not otherwise have known I had to say. The more I write poetry, the more poetry I read, as absorbing other poets’ strategies for delivering perception always helps me find ways to explore my topics.
Here’s a poem I wrote under the influence of the cadences and repetitions in Walt Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking“:
Six Months After My Son’s Death, I Chant to Sing for Him
Out of daily steps and out of drives
on highways, out of hour’s rocky patches
and moments made of weeds, memories come.
I sing the evening I visited my son and watched
his friends working in his kitchen with hops and yeast
and recipes downloaded from the Internet.
I sing the carboys they showed me topped
with see-through tubes and shiny copper
for reading yeast’s performance.
I sing their logs of sugar content and bottled
batches, the way the young men sterilized the bottles
they used, invited people for the harvests
of oatmeal stout and porter. I sing each week
they went to school between their Sunday fests.
Long and deep, I mourn and wake to sing the sun
to rise, to thank my son for time he spent
inside my dreams. I sing, I sing and do what
he was doing, siphoning good spirit from sediment.
_________
I hope I have encouraged you to try your hand at poetry. Find a poem you like and read it several times. Then see what happens when you put your pen to paper (yup, I always begin poems on paper). – Sheila Bender
– Top photo: Detail from “What We Remember,” a mixed-media construction by Cindy La Ferle. For a closer look, click on the image. –
Meanwhile, if you enjoy the short essays I typically feature here, I hope you’ll track down a copy of Writing Home in bookstores or on Amazon. I’ll miss you, and would love it if you’d stop by to say hello. But I’ll understand if you can’t. I hope you’ll be outside in the sunshine, too, taking a break to read a novel in your lawn chair, or pausing to admire what’s growing in your own garden. Warmest wishes for a happy summer, Cindy
