Putting Pieces Together by Shelley Gillespie

"Why does one write, if not to put one's pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce the soul from the body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth."

~ Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

I write from Sevilla where I haven't been writing very much. I have been making postcard collages, putting pieces together literally. I spent my first day in Sevilla looking for card stock and buying scissors and glue, passing the indigenous Ecuadorans or Bolivians (I guessed) selling hand held fans decorated with bouquets of flowers. In this heat a fan is practical. In Sevilla the fan also represents tradition and coupled with ruffled dresses in bright colors Flamenco is the next thing to come to mind. Sevilla's traditions are well-rooted and well-marketed to tourists, the only ones who dare traverse the white hot streets at three in the afternoon when every shop is closed and every sane Sevillano is taking the requisite siesta in an air conditioned apartment. To see these indigenous Americans selling these fans unfurled on cotton sheets spread over the cobbled streets lined with fancy shops struck me - so many layers of entangled history. After I found my materials, I passed the coffee chain Cafe de las Indias.

I've been using collage to address this entangled history. Cutting up images of Sevilla's architecture to create dresses in the frilly style of Flamenco. Cutting up images of Queen Isabel, benefactor to violence across Spain and the Atlantic, and setting her inside windows that line an alleyway called Callejon de la Inquisicion. Putting pieces together literally to make sense of history and the construction of identity.

My First Garden

This is the first year I’ve planted my own garden. As a child, I helped my parents weed and water theirs, and over the years I’ve stuck my hands in dirt enough times to know that I like it, but for a variety of reasons (always traveling, living in apartments, or simply not motivated) I’ve never seen one through from start to finish, had the responsibility rest in my hands, or rather, in the hands of me and my partner.

Our garden is messy, experimental, and doesn’t get enough sun. Our garden is imperfect, as gardens should be. First, we cobbled together a raised bed with old mismatched boards and hauled in a bunch of dirt-- dirt which turned out to be filled with bark and too dense for most of the delicate roots of our greens to push through. For several months, I watered and hoped that the tiny shoots would grow, but they more or less stayed the same size until my husband finally replanted them in soil from our composted leaves. Within days, they were growing. Lesson learned.

We also had to hack down a bunch of cedar and holly branches to let in more light, but our garden is still lucky to see a few good hours a day. In the main bed we planted lettuce, kale, chard, green onions, peas, beans, and zucchini. On our deck we planted tomatoes, basil, cucumbers and peppers in pots. I walk by other people’s gardens and see giant mature vegetables already begging to be eaten, whereas the peas and a few leaves of basil are the only thing we’ve been able to harvest so far. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to eat abundant greens throughout August and September, but for now, we’re still buying our veggies at the store.

Thankfully we are not relying on our harvest to eat or sell, but rather, our garden is a learning project, an excuse to go outside more often and watch dirt absorb water, turn into something rich and fertile, a ploy to get me to be more observant, to notice the speed and quality in which things grow, which direction the stems and leaves are reaching for sunlight, which soil is most thirsty and which is healthiest. And to notice my own distracted and aware states, the ebb and flow of my emotions, days where the watering is rushed or neglected, or days where I am a gentle, observant nurturer.

There’s also something so satisfying of course about gathering a bowl full of peas and cutting them up and putting them in my salad—from garden to stomach in minutes. There’s something so beautiful about being rooted enough in a home where I want to take the time to build and plant and cultivate. This is coming from someone who was wed to the transitory traveling life for years, someone who still longs on a regular basis to take off and live a life undistracted by too many emails or obligations, who has cultivated a love for being places where nobody knows my name.

But those longings belong more to the realm of fantasy right now. For an equally strong urge has taken hold-- the urge to stay in one place, to cultivate old friendships or new ones that have the potential to last a long time. It helps, of course, owning a home. I wonder if I didn’t, if the urge to root would be quite as strong, or if it’d be too easy to give in to the lure of someplace other, a different country, especially China which holds so many keys to my tongue and heart. A place where it is easy to stay in a state of awareness, because everything is vibrantly different and new— until it isn’t, and then you can leave.

What I love the most about traveling is the ease to which one can stay present and aware, open to unexpected encounters or invitations, meeting new people, stopping at the side of the road to take notice, as opposed to being caught up in a mind filled with anxiety about meetings or deadlines or careers or self image. When traveling, your job is to meet your own basic needs: food, shelter, water; running errands like going to the post office, bank, or market; writing letters or emails to keep ties to dear ones strong—and otherwise, to simply stay open to what the day will bring, whether you are feeling tired or energetic, whether you want to seek out another or wander alone.

I suppose I’m talking about the kind of traveling that one sinks into after you’ve been gone for weeks, or months. The kind of traveling where your destinations are only loosely plotted and where you have enough open-endedness to drift away from normal markers of time. Where you begin to forget what day it is, because it doesn’t really matter, and where you feel so utterly alive and in the moment that you wish that everyone could have this same kind of experience—risk letting go of tightly constricted tethers of your identity, risk losing old versions of yourself in order to discover new versions, a new sense of who you are emerging, transforming, changed.

As I write this, I am aware of how this longing for that kind of travel can also be a form of escapism. I’m aware of how most people think that such a lifestyle is okay for people in their twenties, but that people in their thirties or older should’ve gotten over those fantasies by now and commit to a more responsible life. And I am aware of how I still argue for either side—the longer it’s been since I’ve experienced that kind of travel, the more I remind myself that I would like to again—and hopefully in not too long. Yet the longer I was away—traveling, in China, for years apart from my family and friends and the Pacific Northwest where I was raised—the more I longed for a rooted community and home.

I am still learning how to commit myself to one place, one network of people and friends, my writing colleagues and students, my writing, my parents, my partner. And to commit means that it is not so easy to cut loose and go away. It means that I need to learn how to cultivate that same expansive awareness that I was shown while backpacking while on a walk in my own neighborhood, on a weekend camping trip, or in my own living room, in my heart and my mind. I am learning how to find balance, getting older as some might say—and yet, I don’t like feeling trapped in one possible vision of what is ‘realistic,’ never have. So I leave my heart open to the universe to bring what it will, to teach me what I need. I try to remain open to all the possibilities, to stay open to what my heart needs, and to beware of words like ‘should’—or at least to be aware of where they are coming from. You never know, you might still find me on a cheap flight to Hong Kong or a ferry to Alaska next summer. Or, more likely, you might find me here, in North Seattle, digging, watering and harvesting from a new crop of vegetables and weeds.

Logbook: My desk by Shelley Gillespie

I am leaving for Barcelona in a little over a week. More than our apartment and its ten minute proximity to the Pacific Ocean, more than the farmers' markets bursting with every fruit and vegetable known to my longing palate, I will miss my desk. This place in the corner of a cream colored room where I've settled into writing over the last several months. A wooden angel crafted in El Salvador and painted in bright colors hangs from my lamp and dangles over a photo from my pumpkin poem project which reads: plan to stay open heart + mind.

My newest collage leans against the wall facing me - a bunch of beets created from torn pieces of drafts of a prose poem that focuses on a market day when I sold vegetables. I superimposed text from the poem over the beets:
Would you like a bunch of beets? I ask.
Not at that price.
Feel my hands
touch this spot in my lower back
find the price of these beets here in my flesh

How much is that worth to you?

I'm selling myself
my work
my ache in these beets

and my love.

In the opposite corner from the lamp and angel, sits a gourd cut in half to serve as a small bowl or cup, the kind used for sipping mezcal in rural Oaxacan towns to celebrate the cane harvest. Inside the gourd I've placed seeds. Of course you have, say those who know me best. Small black beans grown in Sunnyside, Washington, cubaces beans the color of rust picked up on my last trip to Santa Maria de Dota, Costa Rica, maize seeds, one a bright red and called sangre de cristo by its farmer and one large pumpkin seed that I think might be from a massive pumpkin my farming friends unloaded at their harvest party. It took up the entire bed of a pickup truck. On top of the seeds, a slip of paper pulled off of a tea bag with tea bag wisdom: Live with reverence for yourself and others. Are you getting the sense that my desk is part altar?

A small stack of books include the Popul Vuh (needed to find out what exactly happened to the corn god when he descended into the underworld), Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Western North America (needed to accurately identify the cliff swallows that have made their mud nests in the eaves outside the window in front of one section of my desk), a journal from 2006 (needed to help jog memories of the Oaxacan maize farmer I met who worked in the bracero program).

Next to the seeds sits a succulent plant with a hawk feather stuck in its dirt. Beside the plant, tacked to the wall a Union Match brand box half way open with a plastic farmer inside as if the match box were his coffin. I leaped on the farmer when my friend's birthday pinata broke over beach sand.

In small glass jars, colored pencils, an x-acto knife and ball point pens splay, pointing to multiple spots on the cream ceiling. I rarely write with ball point pens, preferring fine rolling ball pens with black ink. Ball point pens have a way of creeping into your life whether you use them or not. I've never been to the Santa Barbara Bank & Trust nor to Yosemite but somehow I have ball point pens that advertise such places sitting in my jar. Curious about this, I pick up the clear ball point pen with its vial of blue ink that rests on my desk. Aside from the brand Faber Castell, Turkey is etched onto the pen; something my sweetheart must have picked up in his travels, needing a pen to write a stack of postcards perhaps. I like this - in the midst of all of the things placed with such intention to inspire me through the hard work of writing, these pens have found their place here.

Of course, my desk will be here when I return in three months.

What It Takes

A student asked me recently, “How long did it take you to write your memoir?”
How long? That’s a hard question to answer, for it’s hard to say when exactly I started working on it (and it’s even a bit of a stretch to now say I am done). A few of the newest pieces still need some revision, and I’m still not convinced that I’ve found the right piece or note to end on, but all in all, it’s more done than it ever has been, with no obvious gaps of stories that still need to be written, and with a nice query letter and book proposal to go along, ready to send to agents. So for the sake of feeling good and moving on, I’m calling it done.

But how long has it taken me? A few chapters have their inceptions in writing I first did ten years ago, and the themes of the book—cultural identity, bilingualism, spirituality, backpacking, China, America, Buddhism, Tibet, compassion, family, relationships, love and more—well I’ve been writing about those for even longer. While I lived in China from 1999-2002, I wrote almost every day—both in my journal and crafting pieces--, and when I returned to live in the States, I kept writing, joined writing groups, took classes and polished pieces for submission. Then from 2004-2006, I started my low-residency MFA program through Antioch in L.A., and had the privilege of more or less becoming a full-time writer. I house sat for friends, sometimes for months at a time—the most idyllic stint being the few months I spent out in Dungeness, Washington, writing from a room that looked out upon wetlands and out further to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Dungeness Spit. Every day I wrote for hours, kept company by Gracie the old Airedale, and Bonnie the obsessive-compulsive licking cat. By late afternoon, I’d go for a two-hour walk by the river with Gracie or else hop on my bike and ride along country roads and out to Dungeness State Park. At night, I’d pick tomatoes and basil from my friend’s garden, make a nice dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and look over the work I did during the day, editing here and there, before retiring to books in bed. It was blissful—I saw no one besides an occasional nod to the neighbors, I was in between relationships so had few phone calls or distractions, and I didn’t even feel lonely. Communicating online about writing and books with my grad school companions and sending a packet of my work to my mentor each month was enough social interaction for me. I was as productive as I’ve ever been, working on new pieces at the same time that I edited the old.

For several years, I house sat like this, lived frugally, and polished and wrote what would become my final manuscript—and the core of my book-to-be. In between idyllic housesitting gigs, I lived in my parents’ basement in Seattle (not a highlight in my thirty-some-year-old life) but a way to keep writing nevertheless. Eventually I learned to call what I was working on my “book,” which somewhere along the way even picked up a title: Searching for the Heart Radical: A Journey Between East and West. By now, I’d had enough feedback from writers I respected to know that my dream of publishing was not delusional, and I’d put enough time and faith into this whole writing venture that there was no way I could turn away-- or feel qualified to do much of anything else.

That brings us to the last few years, the last few years in which I seem to have been repeating the mantra: “I’m almost done, almost done, almost done with my book…” only to see another year go by with progress made, yes, and yet still without a sense of completion. There were always still pieces to be written, or some of the oldest pieces (remember those that had their inception ten years ago?) now needed to be completely rewritten. These stories were important to the manuscript, the stories needed to stay, and yet my writing and voice had grown so much over the years, and sometimes you simply can’t breathe new life into old words, you just need to start over (if you can manage to let go of those old versions that are now imprinted in your head); you need to find a new beginning or angle of entrance, try and articulate new meaning out of the same sets of experiences, frame a part of your life through a new lens. Not the easiest thing to do.

And then there was the question of structure, the order in which to place the pieces, and the question of what to call it—a collection of essays, a memoir, a collection of linked stories? I’d heard that “essays don’t sell”, so I figured I’d better call it a memoir. Except the problem was, I initially wrote most of the pieces to stand alone so some were in present tense, some in past; some chronicled a day in the life, others looked back over a period of years; some were told in a straight-forward narrating voice, others were more lyrical. There was a more-or-less chronological order that I could put them in, but there were all kinds of gaps or overlaps in time, there were pieces that stuck out oddly in tone, and some that still felt amateurish.

For months (years?) I meditated on the question of whether I could indeed call this into a memoir. I drew inspiration from writers like Abigail Thomas or Nick Flynn who had fashioned interesting non-linear memoirs told through multiple points of views (e.g., 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person; or some chapters that read more like prose poems). I started editing out redundancies (for example, I’d had to establish the fact that I was a half-Chinese/half-Caucasian American woman living in China for practically every stand-alone piece, and now these repetitions had to go), and I started filling in blanks (i.e. writing “bridge pieces” that would explain why in one piece I’m here, and in the next piece I’m suddenly somewhere else, or seeing a different guy). Or something like that.

Finally, about a year and a half ago, I sent out query letters and book proposals (with sample chapters) to a few agents and one in particular took interest, asking me to send her everything I had. Yet in the end, although she felt the writing was good, she just couldn’t see it—it lacked a narrative arc and/or a singular idea, it still read too much like a series of stand-alone pieces. I was bummed, yet not completely disheartened. What she said made sense, and yet, there were so many pieces that I had not sent her at the time because they were not yet completed. So I decided that I needed to just finish the damn thing before I sent it out again; that way if it was rejected again (which surely it would be-- on the way to that eventual yes), I would know that it was rejected on the basis of the whole, as opposed to on the strength of the book proposal and about half of the total chapters.

So over the last year or more, I’ve worked on writing those bridge pieces, as well as agonizing through the pieces that have been most difficult for me to write-- important pieces that have admittedly been revised to death (and that in ordinary circumstances I would let go of because I’d learned what I needed to learn from that piece and because not all pieces need to see completion much less publication), but in this case pieces that I simply could not let go of because they were so central to my book. I suppose if I’d just given up on the whole ‘memoir’ thing and decided to call it a collection of essays, these pieces wouldn’t matter so much because you, the reader, would have never know what I was leaving out. But the way it is fashioned now, surely you would wonder what the hell happened in Tibet or why I quit my job in Chengdu, stories that I would have to have gone out of my way to not mention or to disguise their presence, which forced me to ask myself, again and again—what is up with these trouble stories? Can I do without them? And if not, am I willing to do the work to get to the heart of them, in a new fresh way?

Now, I’ve finally gotten the manuscript to a place where it feels whole. Now I just need to keep on at it, query more agents, thicken my skin, get prepared for the inevitable rejections, and that one, important yes. At the same time, I need to keep writing new stuff. As someone who values follow-through and needs to have a sense of completion, I’ve been so focused on this book that I’ve put so much other new writing on hold. Now, I need to consciously cajole myself into experimenting with new subject matters, genres, and forms. Hence, this blog. And hence the new book (which feels presumptuous, yet deliciously intuitive to even call a book) which will focus on my inheritance from Frank and Els, sifting through their writing and things, ingesting their lives and stories, and meditating on home, death, impermanence, what we value in life and what we pass on. (See my last post and future posts for more on this.)

So all of this brings me back to the question: how long have you been working on your memoir? Maybe I’ve been working on it my whole life, and maybe it’s only been the last few years that the actual ‘memoir’ has emerged. All I know is, for now I am calling it “done,” and moving on to the next phase of my writing life, whatever this may bring. I will always be Searching for the Heart Radical, I know that much is true. But I’ve also entered a mellower phase, a settling phase, a phase centered around the idea of being in one place and putting down roots, as opposed to the solitary wandering, heart aching, intense spiritual questioning that I lived through in my twenties.

I joke—and hope, seriously now-- that the next book will not take me ten years to write. That maybe I’ll be able to finish it in two. And I certainly do not want to suggest that others need to take as long as I did to write their first memoir. Maybe I am just one of those SLOW writers, and maybe that’s okay. All I know is, you never know what you will be given from the universe to write about-- as a gift, or an urge, or a compulsion—but when you do sense you have something to explore through words, that you have a story to tell, to uncover, and to understand more deeply through the telling, you need to trust in this gift, and you need to follow it.

You can’t know from the onset how long it will take you to get a story right, and whether or not this ‘rightness’ will then mirror the tastes of the publishing world. But if you are willing to ride that exhilarating, yet difficult edge between writing just for the sake of writing, writing for the process and for what you will undoubtedly learn from it—and writing for a greater audience, writing to craft beautiful sentences, paragraphs, and manuscripts that other people can read and gain insight from-- if you can ride this edge, and hold onto your essential love for writing no matter what praise or silence comes of it, then you have what it takes to be a writer.

The Gift

I live next door to the house I grew up in.

I inherited my home from my old neighbor.

Frank was a good friend. His wife, Els, died ten years earlier, and I was close to her too, growing up as a child. But after she died, I grew closer to Frank and came to know him as an adult. He was diagnosed with cancer during the last couple years of his life, but he still managed to get out and work in the yard, do many of the things he'd always done. He was fiercely independent, stoic, and private, so he never asked for help with anything. Towards the end, he seemed to have reached a certain peace with his life and upcoming death. He died over three years ago in early May.

Frank never told me he planned to leave me his house. I found out when his nephew read Frank's will out loud at a small memorial service held by the family. My breath grew heavy and my face began to tingle. I felt overwhelmed, blown away, guilty, amazed, ecstatic. I didn't know how the family felt about it, this stranger in their midst who'd been left the biggest prize of all. They all seemed to have learned the news before I had; perhaps they'd had some time to digest its shock and thus hide their emotions. I wanted to express to them how much I would honor this gift. And yet, in that moment, all I could do was sit back in a surreal state of gratitude as the others were encouraged to put yellow sticky notes with their names on the things they wanted.

Els and Frank didn't have any children. This last bit of information seems important to disclose to help explain how I was left such a huge gift from someone who was not a blood relative. I only saw Frank once every couple months or so back then. I was living in Olympia and would try to visit him whenever I was back in Seattle. Frank would make a pot of black tea and put out a plate of cookies (Grandma's oatmeal or dark chocolate Little Dutch Boys), and then we'd sit at the dining room table and talk. I'd talk about my writing or my latest travels, and he'd tell me about what books he was reading or share news from his family. Always there'd be a huge stack of books he'd gotten from Magnuson's biannual book sale; he was an avid reader, sailor, and traveler and thus fond of books about ships and the sea, about early colonial explorers, about Native Alaskan art, about South American culture. He was also a huge fan of Conrad, Hemingway, Melville, James, Austen, and others.

Books were great entryways into conversations about life, about literature, about the world. I embarrassingly admitted that I hadn't read most of the classic canon, though some day I wanted to. Once he gave me an extra copy of Pride and Prejudice to read, and try as I did, I couldn't get through it. Likewise, he called one of the books I lent him (Tim O'Brien's The Things they Carried, set during the Vietnam War) the "worst junk he'd ever read." He thought it was a completely inaccurate representation of war, and of course I couldn't argue otherwise. Frank had served during WWII, though he rarely shared his war stories with me. One day he told me that he read a book that was even worse than the one I'd lent him; someone had given him Tuesdays with Morrie, complete crap. I laughed and was relieved that I could agree with him on this one-- sentimental chicken-soup-for-the-soul life and death lessons for the masses. Not literature.

But books weren't the only thing that we connected through. There was so much about Frank and Els, their home-- a cedar cabin surrounded by tall maples and cedars--, and the way they lived that I resonated with. Frank was a merchant marine, and spent much of his life traveling around the world. Els was a poet, and loved to paint, bake, and philosophize about the meaning of the universe. Every summer the two of them would set out in their sailboat, the Hoko, and cruise up the sound into the waters of the Inside Passage off the shores of Canada. On board for months, they bathed and washed their clothes in the water; read, wrote, and cooked hearty meals on a woodstove in the cabin; visited old Indian villages, some abandoned, some still inhabited; combed the beach for shells, rocks, beads, and bottles; climbed up into old orchards and collected apples, berries, and stories from the locals that came to know this American couple who visited each summer.

They knew how to live a simple, yet decadent life, filled with earthly pleasures. They were extremely frugal, having lived through the Depression, yet their home was filled with treasures from around the world-- woven baskets, wooden chests, woolen blankets, copper pots, bowls of shells and arrowheads. As a child, I relished in the sheltered mossy enclave that was their yard; I inhaled the scent of baking bread, pies, and cookies; I spent hours on their floor arranging smooth black stones into intricate patterns before the giant fireplace. At their home, I felt enveloped in a natural goodness and beauty.

As an adult, spending more time alone with Frank, I looked to him as an example of how life could be lived. One didn't have to spend the entire year working, mired in busy-ness with no time to sit back, listen, sail, cook, and read. One didn't have to acquire a lot of things or a big house or a fancy title or big ego. And one didn't have to only live a settled life or a wandering life, either or-- there were ways to navigate a balance in between. There were ways, it was possible. Here was an elder who understood my impulses. Here was an elder who valued silence, literature, and solitude, as much as he valued people, children, and world cultures. Here was an elder who carried so much wisdom, and yet who was so humble. He knew he didn't have much time. He was a living lesson in how to not cling or hold on too tight. As far as I could tell, he had no regrets. As far as I know, he'd followed his whims and heart in life. And he'd come out okay. In fact, more sane and at peace than almost anyone I knew.

Frank left me a gift, and in moments I am still reeling. After several years of dealing with the probate, a long drawn-out process sorting through possessions and deeds and titles with the family, and a few interim periods where friends or renters stayed in the house, my husband and I finally uprooted from Olympia last summer and moved in.

Now, I live next door to the house I grew up in. I live in the magical secret garden next door, the one with the hidden raspberry patch and giant pile of composting leaves. There is so much more I want to tell you about this still unfolding process -- about the months of cleaning and going through someone else's things; about the discovery of old letters between husband and wife in the attic; the basement filled with artifacts from the sea; the flickers, raccoons, squirrels, and jays that also call this place their home; the yard filled with native plants-- ferns, salal, oregon grape, salmonberries-- and my burgeoning obsession with naming and pruning and caring for these plants that I may very well tend for a lifetime.

Any Farmers Here? by Shelley Gillespie

In early February, I attended a UCSB conference on Food Security and Sustainability that addressed food issues through interdisciplinary approaches - literature, history, social sciences, film. My kind of conference. In a packed room on the sixth floor of the Humanities building, a speaker asked the audience, "Are any of you farmers?" Close to the last row, I raised my hand. Very few others raised their hands. This conference was based in academia, after all. Later in the day, another speaker asked, "Can I see a show of hands, how many people here are farmers?" I held my cup of tea and didn't raise my hand.

I became a farmer in Costa Rica. I made my way at the age of twenty to live in a small, coffee-farming, mountain town. How? First, I fell in love in the States with a man from Costa Rica. I proceeded to drop out of college to accompany him home with our dream of farming organically. We drove thousands of miles across Mexico, into Central America. We reached Arturo's town and his parent's house on a foggy afternoon, waking them from their siesta. His parents were overjoyed with the return of their black sheep son and with me,the young - se ve tan joven, tan joven - gringa wife.

I didn't fully understand until later, when I spoke Spanish more fluently and had absorbed cultural nuances, that by joining the men in the fields I defied the accepted role of a woman. This was 1995. Women harvested coffee and collected coffee wood for cook fires, but carry a back pack sprayer or prune the bananas or thin the coffee sprouts? Rarely, if ever. Much less the daughter-in-law of Egerico Segura, the hard working, respected, land-owning, coffee cooperative board member. Still, this family I married into valued hard work above anything else and despite the town gossip, I won my place in the field with don Egerico and his sons.

I remember my first day in the field. I marveled at the shiny dark green leaves of the coffee plants that rose six feet around me. The day's work: pruning the banana plants that grew among the coffee bushes, reducing the banana clumps to three stalks. Banana plants create folds of fibrous layers to form their stalks and when cut release a sap that stains your clothes and hands. Some of the stalks were as big around as my waist. I whacked at the stalks, turning them to pulp, splattering myself with sap. There is an art to cutting down a banana plant and I needed this first lesson. Arturo's brother appeared by my side. He must have heard the whack-whack-whack of my machete and not the clear cracking of a falling banana. He pointed to his eyes and then back at the plants. Look. I spoke very little Spanish and he refused to speak the little English he'd learned on a restaurant stint in New Jersey. I wasn't sure if my presence in the field was humorous or annoying to him. He aimed his glinting machete at the top of the thick stalk. He sliced down at a forty five degree angle. He aimed his machete up at another forty five degree angle, to cut a wedge out of the banana. Slowly, he cut more of the wedge until he could knock the top part of the plant onto the dirt. Then he took aim at the lower section and with strong, swift strikes of his machete sliced the stalk into sap-oozing sections. He motioned that I shouldn't let the stalks fall onto the coffee plants. Later in the day, Arturo gave me my second lesson: use the weight of the machete to guide your strike otherwise your muscles won't last a day in the field. I already knew, with all of my heart, I wanted to last more than a day.

I memorized the weather of the region. Black clouds barreled into the valley from the Pacific, fierce with lightening, dropping the ocean in a thunderous downpour, often before we could make it home. In the dry season, the hawks shrieked and Egerico said, "Summer is coming." The dry heat could fry thoughts right out of me as I left droplets of sweat on the soil. I felt sexy in my thick-soled black rubber boots, the shoe of choice for every campesino. Shovels and machetes, rock bars and desbajadores became extensions of my own body. We sculpted the terrain in our constant efforts to save the soil's fertility, terracing acres of hillside. Mid-morning breaks became a ritual I savored. Sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade out of recycled Coke liters, and chatting. At the end of the break, the machetes were sharpened; little flakes of steel fell from the blade. The Dota valley and those hillsides and the teachings of Egerico, Henry, Arturo and all of the other men I worked with, turned me into a farmer.

I'm still telling this story today, even after I left the farm over four years ago. I raised my hand at that conference because my experience as a farmer formed me. I am a farmer.

But wait, when was the last time I strapped the leather machete sheath around my waist? When was the last time the back pack sprayer with the faulty lid sloshed its 16 liters of fish emulsion down my back? When was the last time, thinking about my vegetable farming in the States, that I hauled irrigation tubes across hot sandy soil? When was the last time my hands were so callused they snagged on my clothes? I couldn't raise my hand again in the afternoon.

In the spring of 2007, I agonized over a decision that seemed immanent. I had to leave farming and my friends' farm I'd been working on. I was waking up every morning with numb hands. I desperately wanted a new challenge. I cried every day. If I walked away from this work, who would I be? I couldn't see any other story to tell about myself. I can not claim to be a farmer if I am not active in the field. At the same time, I see now, farming, like writing, influences how I experience the world and what I care about. The physical labor with its just fruits is only one element. I've also learned a way of observing from farming, a close eye for "the gleam of particulars" as poet Naomi Shihab Nye puts it.

I recently applied for a farming position with a local high school. In writing about my experiences in my cover letter, I wondered about the web presence of the farm I built with Arturo and what these potential employers might discover online. I found the website for the farm which Arturo has turned into a collective. There is no mention of my contribution. I have been edited out of the history of Sol Colibri. I felt a shot of anger. I took most of the pictures on the site. I created the logo. So much heart felt labor after so many years of my life. Slowly the anger calmed to contemplation. Does this really matter? Ego says yes. Does it really matter? Not really. In fact, it's interesting. Look closely at what we choose to tell or not tell. Look closely at how attached I am to the stories I tell about myself. In the end, I am a writer through it all, composing lines, deleting lines, in constant effort to tell a good story. I am a farmer, let me tell you, and I am not a farmer, as I sit here at my computer with soft hands, crafting this post.

The Paradox of Storytelling

Recently, I attended a dharma talk and meditation led by Steve Armstrong, in which he talked a lot about story: noticing the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, how clinging to our story can cause us suffering, learning to let go of our story. As a good Buddhist, I knew what he meant, but as a writer and storyteller, I found myself analyzing and questioning whether I fully agreed with what he was saying and how I might articulate a more balanced point of view.

Here's the thing: meditators train themselves in awareness. We train ourselves to be mindful of our breath, our thoughts, sensations, feelings, emotions-- whatever comes in and out of our awareness continuously throughout the day. When we are meditating and we notice that another thought-- or more like train of thoughts-- has been passing through our mind, we just note that our minds have once again drifted and come back to our awareness of the breath. We train ourselves to come back to the present moment, and to let go of the constant storyline-- what to do tomorrow, how it went yesterday, what we want to eat for dinner, how annoying that person is, why we are so stupid. Anyone who has ever tried to sit quietly and pay attention to their breath for even five minutes can attest to how hard it is not to think. We are constantly thinking without even realizing it, our minds are on auto-pilot, and most of the time-- if we pay attention-- we will see that our thinking follows certain patterns or storylines-- notably some version of the "I'm not good enough" storyline seems to be a popular one in our culture.

Writing is also a form of awareness training. Through the act of writing (or wanting to write) most of us naturally begin to pay closer attention to everything around us-- people, dialogue, colors, stories. We are constantly on the lookout--whether consciously or unconsciously-- for new seeds, new ideas, new beginnings of new pieces. We learn to notice the small details of our lives. And as we write, we learn to follow our stream-of-conscious thoughts and eventually enter that Zen state of writing-- where we are not thinking or plotting but instead, we are so in the zone that one word effortlessly follows the next and we are no longer in control of our words. It' s almost like channeling-- we allow ourselves to become so empty and open that the words and ideas can pour out and surprise us.

What I'm getting at is quite simple: both meditation and writing can both be forms of awareness practice, and a form of emptying out. With sitting meditation, we are letting go of thoughts, and with writing, we are following them. One is an inward practice, the other is outward and expressive. One dissolves, the other holds forth. Depending on how you look at it, they are either radically different practices or very much the same. It's paradoxical of course-- both are true.

Personally, I need them both. I value the little experience I've had sitting quietly for hours in retreats, and the knowledge that, yes, eventually, I can experience brief moments of nothingness-- no thoughts, no anxiety, no personality, just the peace of being, open, aware, alive. These moments are priceless, and I still consider myself a complete novice when it comes to truly reaping the benefits of such a practice (the longest I ever meditated daily was for one month while I was attending Rodney Smith's beginning class with SIMS- Seattle Insight Meditation-- invaluable; I would recommend it to almost anyone, regardless of your affinity towards Buddhism or spiritual beliefs). BUT, I am primarily and unabashedly a writer, a storyteller, someone who spends hours, months, years of my life exploring, contemplating, and unraveling my own experiences.

I write stories so I can relive experiences and fully understand their impact. I write stories so that I can better understand my relationship to specific places, people, and periods of my life. I write stories to celebrate, to mourn, to pay tribute, to grieve. So much happens in our lives and rarely do we have the time to pay enough attention as it is happening. So much happens, and before we know it, we are already moving on to the next great adventure, hardship, struggle, romance, loss. Through writing I learn to slow down, to pay closer attention, to not let things slip by unnoticed. To listen when a tug of the heart of a flash of an image tells me: write this down. This story needs to be written.

So here's the crux: we need our stories. Not the old, often-triggered, and unexamined stories, but the stories that we've truly taken the time to recall and lay out with full disclosure, without censoring to make ourselves look better, the stories we offer to ourselves and to others with full transparency and acceptance of the roles that we've played. We are never just helpless victims, nor are we ever just evil aggressors. There is always some kind of balance at play, a balance of being acted upon and acting out, simultaneously being affected by the world and affecting the world, absorbing and expressing. Yes, sometimes hard and ugly truths need to come out, but ultimately, we expose these in an effort towards healing, so those truths-- no longer unexamined and thus hidden-- no longer need to shame us. We look closely at ourselves, so that we can let go of old images of self. Again, it's a paradox. The more closely we have examined our stories, the more we can recognize them as just that-- stories. Not hardened, unchangeable definitions of who we are and will always be. But versions of who we once were, a gradual shifting continuum.

Ultimately, I knew I was on the same page as Steve (the dharma teacher), when he said something about mindfulness practice (i.e. meditation) being akin to the practice of grieving skillfully. In both storytelling and meditation, we learn to watch and listen as things arise and fall away, arise and fall away... we learn to mourn the passage of all these thoughts and people and stories. We pay attention, we see things for what they are, and we see how everything is constantly changing, birthing, dying, passing. We are alive, yet one day we will die. The only proper response is to love and to grieve. To honor this passage and to learn to let go of old stories that we no longer need to hold onto. To know that each time we learn to tell a story right-- to to reach that place where when we read or speak the story our hearts resonate with recognition as if we have finally articulated something we've always known inside -- then we are able to let go that story, to grieve its passage, our passage, into this new moment, and new life.

Adaptability by Shelley Gillespie

Almost every day I think about Seed Scripts, the working title for the book I want to write; a book that will use interviews and research to document the stories of farmers who are preserving native food crops of the Americas. Crops like maize, beans, squash, grains like quinoa and amaranth. Recently, I created a rough draft project proposal and decided I wanted to consult with people who through their own research and personal passions might offer insight into the direction of Seed Scripts. After thinking about it obsessively and telling all of my friends about it, traveling to Mexico and Central America for preliminary research, it’s time to take Seed Scripts out of my mind and my intimate conversations and open its door a little wider.

For quite some time, longer than I like to admit, my daily thinking about Seed Scripts has been centered on what program or within which academic discipline can I place this project? During its early inception, I thought Folklore. Later Anthropology. Perhaps an MFA program. Or UC Santa Cruz’s Social Documentation program. Where can I find a program that will encourage the poetic, the use of dialogue, the shifting point of view, the narrative arc while fostering research both in books and in the field? Yearning structure and mentoring, seeking a place where creativity meets research, longing access to funding and support. A daily yearning, seeking, inquiring, longing. Yeah, I can hear you saying, Damn, just sit down and start writing. I can hear our friend Amy Selena quoting Yoda, “Do or do not…there is no try.”

Last week, I met with a professor with this in mind. She has done extensive research in Oaxaca on maize variety diversity and its use in a traditional beverage, as well as the affects of migration on these maize growing communities. I read her publications online before our meeting. While her subject matter was truly fascinating, the writing followed the standard academic journal style. After all, she is writing for her peers and not a general audience. This is not the kind of writing I want to do.

Through the windows of her office, the campus spread out behind her from the fourth floor vantage. Throughout our conversation, her bracelets jangling, this is what she asked (and I paraphrase): Have you asked the farmers what they’d want to document? If one of their grandchildren moved to the city, and then wanted to plant this native maize, what would they want to know? How will this work benefit the communities that you’ll be interviewing in? Why do this work?

I left her office, crossed the street, and sat on a bench on a cliff overlooking the ocean. This is a campus setting to either inspire educational endeavors or one to offer every possible outdoor reason to avoid studying all together. I watched pelicans become black dots on the blue horizon as they dove toward the sea. I wanted to take Seed Scripts, every last thing about it, and toss it off the cliff. Why do this work? Yes, why? I wanted to give up.

After sitting on the cliff and imagining tossing Seed Scripts into the sea, I spent the next several hours embodying the thought. Not all ideas deserve fruition. How could my documentation of farmers’ stories really make a positive contribution? I’ve imagined that much of my work for Seed Scripts would require field research in Latin America and yes, I intend to write in English. Does this then set up the dynamic that I as the outsider come in to steal stories and send them into the world without these people ever knowing how their lives have been shared? In no way do I intend to mimic an extractive, exploitive relationship. Ethics are extremely important to me. This work will not make people suddenly care about genetic biodiversity or its guardians. It is doubtful that it could influence agricultural policy. Would it really be used as a resource for future farmers? I don’t imagine writing that kind of text. I let it go, my dear beloved babied project. For a few hours, anyway.

Before this afternoon on the cliff, I’d assumed the purpose of my project was to preserve cultural knowledge (while in no way making any grand assumptions about the scope of my work). My logic, based on first hand witnessing, has gone like this: if biodiversity is endangered through ecological depravation and the realities of neoliberal economics that force people to immigrate away from farming isn’t farmer knowledge of native food crops equally endangered? If we maintain seed banks to preserve genetic resources, why not preserve the cultural knowledge that accompanies the seeds?

This professor’s questions didn’t really open the door wider on the direction of this project but demanded that I rethink which door to enter through. And in rethinking that to bring in the perspective of the people I’m writing about to guide this. I see now that what I was tossing off the cliff was my pre-conceived notion of what Seed Scripts had become. In order to excavate down to the core of what I want to communicate I have to let go. Forcing my commitment and reconnection to the creative process; a process that can be so horribly uncomfortable in its uncontrollable nature.

Farmers and plants, the ones that survive, are adaptable. Climate demands this. Soil types demand this. Life demands this. And so does the creative process. The creative process demands adaptability and dedication. Trust the process and it will give reason enough to continue even when sometimes I want to give up.

I must remember the words of the farmer I am currently writing about, don Gregorio Vazquez Vazquez of Intibucá, Honduras. Working from five in the morning until five in the evening to build his farm on which he plants a maize he’s been growing for sixty years, the maize that feeds his family year after year as he plants it year after year, don Gregorio said, “You have to persevere with what you propose to do in this life.”

Remember, rethink, replenish, replan, reseed...

What is most important?

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Come, listen, the world wants to change you