A Pantoum and a Phone Booth

On listening and being heard.

Candles from our closing ritual at my recent retreat

Poetry

Here’s a pantoum I wrote during a retreat session last week. Don’t worry, it will make more sense as you continue to read the newsletter.

The Phone Booth

I am tired and bleary
shed their bark like skin
heavy with the weight of my selves
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
the phone has no dial tone
I was so happy I wanted to cry.

I am tired and bleary
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
shed their bark like skin
the phone has no dial tone.

Shed their bark like skin
heavy with the weight of my selves
the phone booth has no dial tone
I was so happy I wanted to cry.

Heavy with the weight of my selves
a phone booth at the bottom of the trail
I was so happy I wanted to cry
I am tired and bleary.

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Journeying

I spent most of last week in the San Francisco Bay area helping to facilitate a retreat. I am incredibly grateful to be a part of a relatively small but world-wide contemplative community, a group of diverse individuals interested in leading intentional and attentive lives and sharing that gift with others. Our group gathers every year in February to renew and strengthen our connections and to resource one another in the work we each do to create spaces for other people to encounter this kind of life.

Near the end of our time together, one of my co-facilitators led the rest of us in creating a pantoum. A pantoum is a poetic form made up of particularly organized repeating lines that, as we all discovered, can also be an excellent tool for accessing the subconscious. Our facilitator, who is a dear friend, as are all the people in this group, began by asking us to free write for five minutes. We couldn’t stop to think, to correct spelling or punctuation, just write. After we set our pencils down, she told us to look back over what we had written and pick out six words or short phrases that grabbed our attention. Each word or phrase became a line in our pantoum. As we built our poems and watched our words repeat and combine in new and unexpected ways, meaning emerged. We took turns reading and sharing the surprises we had found in what we had written. While many of us chuckled at what had appeared on the page and some of us thought our poems were “crap” (to quote a participant) until read to the group, we all found some wonder in our words and in what lay within us.

My five minutes of free writing produced sentences about being tired (I hadn’t slept well the night before), Eucalyptus trees, a pay phone in an improbable location, very sleepy newts, camellia flowers, bird of paradise plants, and being so happy I could cry. In short, a real mix of both observations and emotions. You can see in my pantoum the phrases I underlined and chose to include. I can’t say as the resulting poem particularly impressed me with its impromptu artistry, but it did create some combinations that gave me pause. The lines “shed their bark like skin” and “heavy with the weight of my selves” appear together several times. I would like to shed the more cumbersome and painful parts of myself as the Eucalyptus trees shed their bark. I would like to let go and be lighter. The phrases “the phone booth at the bottom of the trail” and “the phone has no dial tone” gave me a little more trouble. On one of our hikes during the retreat, a few of us discovered an out of service but remarkably well-preserved pay phone at a trail juncture. We checked for a dial tone, and also, of course, for any coins left in the change slot and found neither. The phone’s appearance seemed absurd and, therefore, funny to me. I take great joy in the random, so a pay phone in a relatively remote location with its phone book still hanging below it in a black plastic case made me smile. But in the poem, the line “the phone has no dial tone” seems more ominous, like I want to tell someone about my discovery and can’t. I am unable to reach anyone who will listen to my story.

At the retreat, I felt as held and heard as I possibly can, so this line confused me. About a year ago, I read Laura Imai Messina’s A Phone Booth at the Edge of the World. In the novel, those whose loved ones have died travel to an out of service phone booth to “talk” with the individuals they have lost as a way to process grief. The phone booth, which also has no dial tone and no actual way of reaching beyond the grave, nonetheless, promises non-judgemental listening space to those who use it. Maybe my pay phone’s lack of dial tone isn’t ominous but rather indicative of the freedom to say what I want and be heard and possibly healed, to shed some of those heavy selves and learn ease. During the retreat, I enjoyed the company of many wonderful listeners. They heard my stories, and I listened to their own. We were each other’s phone booths. Whether I’m “tired and bleary” or “so happy I [want] to cry,” I need a community to hold and hear me, and I need to do the same for the other members, for their well-being and my own. In California, I experienced a particularly rich expression of this. In my Nebraska community, and the other communal spaces I share, I can notice opportunities to listen and to be heard. I can pay attention to when I am held and when I need to hold. I can remember my pantoum and the incredible people who helped me create it, and I can recognize those I live with every day as co-creators of human spaces where we can all be whole.

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Gardening and Making/Mending

California Camellia and Nebraska Amaryllis

On every visit to California, I spend at least 50 percent of my time photographing plants. February is green season in the San Francisco Bay area, and the particular iridescence of that color at this time of year is a shock to my Midwestern system. I’ve grown accustomed to the many subtle hues of browns and greys that accompany winter here. I am not prepared for magnolias, daffodils, snowdrops, and azaleas blooming together. I cannot process moss growing on the sidewalks and in the parking lots. So to return home and find my long awaited Amaryllis with its first bloom felt surreal and also strangely familiar. I couldn’t remember what type of the many Amaryllis varieties I had purchased, and so the beautiful double bloom was an extra delight. We’ve had particularly warm temperatures in Nebraska lately, and all of the snow is melted. This false Spring makes me look longingly at my garden beds. The Amaryllis, seed buying, and my memories of California will have to sustain me for the next couple of months.

One new knitting project and the potential for another

I’ve finished my wonky mittens and have started a pair of socks for my daughter on tiny mouse sized needles. I like these shorter needles as I don’t have to move the yarn around quite as much, but they do make me feel like one of Beatrix Potter’s furry characters, knitting in miniature. The brownish yarn is a special purchase from Farmer’s Daughter Fibers in Great Falls, MT, where I was born. The color is “Medicine Grizzly,” which I hope is a nod to Two Medicine, my favorite part of Glacier National Park. I often purchase yarn for the name as much as the color (I do this with paint colors as well. I once painted two whole houses a light, watery blue called “Marilyn’s dress”). Most of the knitting you see here happened at the retreat. I co-led a session with another group member who also knits. While the rest of the group worked on individual art collages, we held the space for them by knitting. I see handwork, and art in general, as space creating and space holding both for the creator, eventual wearer, beholder, and appreciator.