Landed

February 2

It is our last day at the Old Mermaids Sanctuary. For the last nine winters, I have written a last essay, often on the last day. I attempted to put into words what this place and this time has meant to me. This is most likely our last visit here, although I’ve said that before. But this time it looks more and more like the place will be sold. This year I’m not certain what to say about this last visit. 

Eight plus years ago, we found this place after I asked friends and acquaintances if they knew of an environmentally safe place in the Southwest where Mario and I could come for a few weeks a year. The Pacific Northwest winters were taking a toll on me, and I wanted some warmth and sunshine. Terri Windling answered my email, telling me she knew of a place that might just work. Nine winters ago, Mario and I arrived here, sight unseen, and discovered a place of extraordinary beauty and mystery—and we fell immediately in love.

That first year, I planned on resting while Mario worked. I ended up writing 60,000 words of nonfiction. I sat under an old mesquite tree many evenings, telling stories to the tree and other visibles and invisibles as the sun went down. I am sitting under that same mesquite tree right now. It is ancient and beautiful and has roots that go all the way to China, or close to it. 

The second winter we were here, the Old Mermaids came up out of the wash and told me their stories. Since then, we have called this place the Old Mermaids Sanctuary, or the Sanctuary. And that’s what it has been for me these eight years. I look forward to coming here all year long. I believe I’ve written nine novels while I’ve been on the Sanctuary. 

Away from the Sanctuary, these haven’t been easy years. I struggled with illness and had two surgeries, both my careers faltered, my father had major heart surgery, a close relative battled drug addiction, one of my brothers-in-law had a severe stroke, Mario dealt with some health issues, my best friend died, two other close friends died suddenly and unexpectedly, and my mother died. One could argue that these are just the days of our lives, but because of my nearly constant anxiety, the normal travails of life often felt more unbearable than they needed to be. 

As the years have gone by, life had continued to get more difficult instead of easier for me, despite my nearly constant attempts to change, to fix what ails me. I have tried just about every healing modality known to humankind (and then some) and still, I wasn’t improving. I studied shamanism and many different kinds of folk healing. Despite some improvements now and again, I was still sick and anxious. I started feeling resentful and morose. I used to think I was put here on this earth to love, but I didn’t love much of anything or anyone any more, at least not with the joy and passion I had once had. 

I didn’t believe this was the life I was intended to live. (Intended by whom? Well, me for one.) When I was younger, I wanted to help people, I wanted to change the world. Now, I just wanted to get well, be well. Whenever I would start seeing some kind of new practitioner, they were always optimistic and certain we could get to the heart of the problem to get me well. (Except Western medicine practitioners: They thought what was going on with me was chronic and I had to learn to live with it.) And then after a year or two into the process (whatever it was: therapy, naturopathy, etc.), the healer would say something like, “Perhaps this is just who you are.” Or maybe I had a block or a miasm or some such.

I never accepted this. And I always thought if I was incurable, then I would accept it. Every person I know with a medical diagnosis for an illness they have has come to terms with their illness. Except me. I didn’t believe it. Despite my own body’s evidence to the contrary, I didn’t believe I was chronically ill. Chronic means forever, right?

What mattered to me was good health. What mattered to me was a cure. When I’d read a book on healing or wellness, the authors would often say there was a difference between healing and being cured. And I’d think, “Bullshit. Obviously you have never been ill.” I didn’t want some pie in the sky healing where I thought everything was peachy-keen even though I was still sick.  

Every time I returned to the Old Mermaids Sanctuary, I believed I would be healed. Every time I wrote a book, I believed I would be cured. And when I wasn’t, I wasn’t so much disappointed as I was perplexed. Because I believed with my whole body and soul that healing is much simpler than we realize. The best shamans, the best healers, the best doctors can heal with a nod, a gesture, a reminder: or by doing nothing at all.

Yes. So where was my nod?

When Mario and I first got to the Sanctuary this year, I had quite a few travails. The details don’t matter, but I felt like I was being pummeled at every level of my being: physical, emotional, spiritual. After a week or more of wondering if we should just go home, I started reading book after book about healing modalities I hadn’t heard of before. I tried every one of them. Sometimes the symptoms I was experiencing actually got worse. Sometimes they got marginally better. 

I watched for signs. If a word or a phrase or a name caught my attention, I followed it through. I researched like crazy. I worked like crazy trying to find a formula to fix me.

I did a tarot reading with three cards. They turned out to be three major arcana cards. The World was me. The Tower was what was happening to me. The Star was how I could deal with the process. The Star is all about healing, completeness, hope, and intuition. In other words, I had done the work. Now let it beeee. I had been trying for so long, working so hard for so long: I needed to learn to let go. To do nothing.

Easier said than done.

I watched a video of Louise Hay called You Can Heal Your Life. Even though I hadn’t found affirmations effective for me in the past, I’ve always felt affection for Louise Hay. She seems so loving (and she’s an indie writer and publisher). She said after years of working with various affirmations and causes of illnesses with people, she discovered that when people learned to love and accept themselves, their lives turned around.

I had heard something like this before, of course, over the years. But I didn’t believe it. I thought, I don’t love and accept myself THIS way. Maybe if I was different THEN I could love and accept myself. But on this day as I watched the video, I realized I didn’t not love other people because they were sick, so why wouldn’t I love myself? I started talking to myself in the third person. “I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this. That must have felt really bad. You’ve been very brave.” 

My spirits began lifting almost immediately. 

I also started to think about who I am and what my life is. All of my life I have talked to the trees, rocks, the sky, plants, animals. I have also talked to that which is not there. But it’s not something I advertised to other people. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed of it, but I knew—especially when I was a child—that it wasn’t something we talked about. (I was a child with a very vivid imagination, as I heard over and over.) 

As an adult, I didn’t talk about it because I never wanted to be considered flaky. I believed I was practical, tough, logical, and absolutely not one of those "airy fairy flakes." Yet I was one of those people who had “gut” feelings that often turned out to be accurate. I knew things that other people didn’t seem to know. I did long distance healing on people—when I didn’t believe in it—and people got better. And I often sensed things that I could never prove one way or another. For instance, I carried on long conversations with plants and with the spirits of the land or a place. I didn’t know if these conversations were “real.” Could I ever know? 

As I struggled this time on the Sanctuary with so many physical problems, I decided to really try and let go and see what happened. (No, not try, just do.) Obviously I couldn’t control everything and the harder I tried the worse it seemed to get. So I closed my eyes and asked “what the hell is going on?” As I was asking this, an old plant friend of mine came and told me he wanted to show me something. I followed him down the wash to the fence the neighbors had put up across the dry riverbed a few years ago. He told me the fence was causing an energy blockage on the land. This time, instead of interrogating him on the truth or reality of what he was saying, I looked up and down the wash and I could “see” lines of light flowing up and down the wash in a kind of “x” pattern, only one “leg” of the pattern was slamming right into the metal pole of the fence. 

I asked him what I could do. He told me to get some rocks and put them around the metal post in a kind of snaky line. I went around the wash asking rocks who wanted to be part of this venture and I picked up the ones who seemed to want to come. When I was finished, I ducked down under the fence and continued walking in the wash. It felt completely different. For the first time since they’d put up the fence, the wash felt like a free flowing river. I closed my eyes and felt the Old Sea roll over me. It was glorious.

Within hours, many of my physical symptoms began to abate. Later in the day, Mario and I went to walk in the wash. We saw a rabbit on the way and I said, “It would be really nice to see your cousin the jackrabbit.” We hadn’t seen any jackrabbits this time. (We had never seen any on the Sanctuary.) Ten minutes later, two jackrabbits ran across the wash in front of us. On the way out of the wash, we said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the owl before we leave?” We hadn’t seen the owls here in a couple of years. A few hours later, an owl showed up on the Sanctuary, and we got to watch her for some time. (She showed up again the next day.)

Apparently on this day, wishes came true in the wash, so Mario and I returned and made other wishes.

Soon after I put the rocks around the fence, I returned to work on the novel I had started and stopped some days earlier (The Monster’s Daughter). I had gotten the idea for the novel just a few weeks earlier when we were driving down Highway 5 near Mount Shasta. Most of the novel takes place in California, near Mount Shasta.

Every year when we travel to Arizona, I make offerings to the land we pass through. I sing and say prayers. We stop at one lookout where I can whisper sweet somethings to Mount Shasta, and I usually leave a shell or a stone. Maybe this year the place decided they wanted the monster’s daughter’s story told and I was the one to tell it. I don’t know, but I wrote 101,000 words and finished the novel in a three weeks. 

As the end of my time on the sanctuary neared, I finally (again) decided that it doesn’t matter if the world perceives me as flaky or airy fairy or whatever words they want to describe someone like me. Healing is in the invisible realms, right alongside magic, love, and joy—right beside the wild.

In Western culture, we want to name things. We want to codify and explain. We want rules for life. Do this and you’ll succeed. Do that and you’ll heal. But the mystery will not be codified or explained. I can’t really explain where my novel came from or why placing stones in the wash coincided with the abatement of many of my symptoms.  Does it matter?

I hear, feel, sense the call of the wild. That is what I do; that is who I am. Instead of running from that call, it is my life’s work—my life’s journey—to listen to that call and to sometimes interpret it. Sometimes I’ll know what it means. Sometimes I won’t. This means I must live on the edge of what is known and unknown, the edge of what can be explained and what is unexplainable. It also means I will live as part of the soul of the world. That is the only way I can fully survive, fully inhabit this body of mine. 

I heard someone on the radio recently say that when we ask for healing, we need to be open to that which comes. We need to open our hearts. A few weeks ago, I bought a heart with a mirror at the center of it. Sometimes I look at it now and tell myself, “I love you.” When I first started doing this, I’d see my face and wonder, “When did I get so old?” Now I just see myself grinning and think, “Years from now I’ll thank myself for all the hard work I’ve been doing during these six weeks.” Or maybe I’ll thank myself for opening my heart and seeing the true beauty in myself.

I started writing this essay under the old mesquite tree. I had to leave and change my clothes because I had gotten thorns all over me. The first year I was here, I was constantly getting pricked by cacti. This experience inspired my story The Señorita and the Cactus Thorn. This year I keep thinking of Briar Rose. She was pricked awake. I feel like that this year. I’ve been pricked awake. Again. And again. Like, “Come on, Kim. GET IT. NOW.” 

I’m getting it. I’m getting it. 

Life is more than stories. It is more than suffering. It is more. It is more. 

One of the books I read this time said we needed to be more aware of our bodies to facilitate our healing. I said to Mario, “I am aware of every bit of suffering I feel. If I’m more aware of my body, it’ll be worse.”

He said, “More aware of the good things you feel in your body.”

“Oh.” That would be a new experience.

One day I was doing yoga and I suddenly felt the rug beneath my feet. I could feel the texture of it on my soles. It felt nice. I walked off the rug onto the cool stone floor. Mmmm. That felt nice, too. I padded around the casita for a few minutes, loving the feel of the stones and the rugs against my feet. It felt good.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it was a beautiful moment for me. 

I intend to string beautiful moment after beautiful moment together until there are more of them than non-beautiful moments. A string of beauty around my life.

I don’t think I can sum up my nine winters here. Being here has changed my life. It has saved my life. And I am grateful for that.

And this year: What about this year? I feel transformed, transfigured, healed, and so much more. What I’m bound to heart and soul and body is still the wild land and everything that lives on it. (And this includes human beings, of course.) These bonds are not binding but liberating. The land makes us; we don’t make the land. I am realizing that in my bones, finally. Maybe again.

This year I kept feeling the pull of the Catalina Mountains. It felt like a kind of yearning, so I followed this yearning. We drove into the mountains and stopped at a high plateau overlooking the desert floor. As we stepped out onto the blond rock, a tiny snake slithered past us. A snake at 7,000 plus feet in the middle of the winter. We took this as an auspicious sign. 

Through the binoculars, we could see the Sanctuary far below us. Gorgeous manzanita trees twisted up from the rocks. I bowed down to them. Stunted evergreen trees likewise rose up from the rocks. They were older than the hills—or close to it. Amidst the beauty was garbage. Normally this reality would have thrown me into melancholy. Instead I whispered an apology and left a song as a gift. (And next time, I’ll bring gloves and a garbage bag.)

At one point, two young men ran all around us, oblivious to the church-like silence most people were maintaining. They huffed and puffed and scrambled onto and off of this rock and that rock, speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. Every time they leaped dangerously from rock to rock, I prayed for their safety. And I smiled at their exuberance. For them, this sacred place must have inspired their bodies to run, jump, and huff and puff. Yes. What a place requires or wants can be different depending upon the person.

Of course.

Instead of being angry or annoyed with them I loved these loud boys. Ahhh. Finally. My heart was opening again. 

What does this all mean?

Perhaps I am finally awakening to the truth of my life. To the truth of the world? 

At the end of The Monster’s Daughter, my main character Emily says, “But Papa, I am so awake.”

Perhaps that sums it up for me, too. That is how I leave this place this year: I am awakening. It’s as if I’ve been on a long space voyage. I slept and dreamed through the entire thing. Now I’ve landed. And I am awake.

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The Monster's Daughter: An Essay

“I gift you with healing and magic.” —Sister Faye Mermaid

“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been thinking about gifts today. And trials. Reality. And monsters.

What is real? What is true? What must we endure and what must we overthrow? 

I don’t believe in suffering for the sake of suffering. Of course we suffer. That is a given. But why cultivate it? And because someone suffers they are not holy, good, or divine. Suffering does not make us better. Lordy, no. Does suffering hone us? Make the sword that is us tougher, more magical, more efficient?

I don’t know. I’m not a sword. I’m a human being. 

If I suffer, if something bad happens to me, I am not a better human being. I’m just a human being who has suffered.

Maybe it depends upon what kind of person one is when something terrible happens. If it comes as a surprise, if it is totally and wholly unexpected suffering, perhaps we can’t rise above it. Get over it. 

I had a remarkably fortunate childhood. I was bonded to the land more than I was ever bonded to any human being. I watched for messages from the skies as I dug my bare toes into the damp earth. I fed the animals, wild and tame. I ran with the wild things.

My mother broke when I was quite young, and she never recovered. Neither did we. Is the soul of a family always the mother? As she goes, so goes the family? 

I don’t want to go there. Why? I find psychology tedious--watery--and not in a good way. I’m too old to be buffeted by childhood trauma. 

And yet.

For years as child, I had merciless nightmares. They were so bad I would fight not to go to bed each night. But doesn’t every child do that? What does it matter? When I slept, the creatures came out of the woodwork and hunted me down. Or tried to. I was runner--a marathoner--in my dreams. I could outrun any monster. 

Except when I was the monster. In one dream I smiled while I spilled my guts. Literally.

As a girl, I tried to hold disparate realities in my mind, in my body, but it was difficult. Where did serial killers fit into my wilderness background? How did the outrageous acts of violence taking place in nearby Detroit, delineated on the nightly news, fit into my childhood? And the pristine river that ran behind our house--the river that flooded every winter and froze, becoming our winter water wonderland where I skated every chance I could get--why was it now unsafe to eat any fish or shellfish taken from it? Why did I see laundry bubbles on the surface when I went down to the riverside?

I did my best. I saved other kids from bullies but became terrified one day when a teacher threatened to switch us all because she was pissed at us. I hid under the bed each morning for days, refusing to go to school because I said I was sick. Why didn’t anyone believe me?

I wasn’t sick: I was afraid. Of course, I never told my parents what was scaring me.

Perhaps fear is a form of sickness. No, it’s a protection, isn’t it? 

And when my animals began to die, I was awash with grief. My parents took me to a doctor and he gave me pills so I wouldn’t be so upset. 

Was that the message of the late sixties and early seventies? Don’t feel. But if you do, take a pill, baby. 

I read books about the coming apocalypse via the atom bomb. I fantasized about making it to the mountains somewhere out west where I’d be safe from a nuclear holocaust. 

We were all going to die from the pollution or a nuclear bomb or some psycho hunting women and if we were afraid about any of it, please don’t mention it; step to the side and take your pills, please, please.

And then I grew up. When I was still in my teens, just barely in college, a psychologist diagnosed me with post traumatic stress disorder. Only she didn’t call it that because they didn’t yet diagnose civilians with this particular disorder. She said I had all of the reflexes of a child who grew up in a war zone. 

What?

She didn’t really know how to help me, except more therapy. 

How did talking about shit that happened when I was a kid help me feel better? So what if my mother was sick and my father was pissed and we were all just trying to do the best we could? I had it fucking easy.

How long after that did some medical doctor tell me I was allergic to the world?

Now THAT really did not help.

I refused to be allergic to the world.

This is my fucking world, buddy. I am not allergic to it.

And yet, I felt like crap.

I got married and Mario and I moved to the Oregon coast. While I was researching a novel, I learned more than I could quite fathom about pesticides and the dumping of toxic chemicals in developing countries. We were also part of a peace group, helping refugees from El Salvador. I couldn’t come to grips with how seemingly cruel people were to one another. I was diagnosed again with post traumatic stress disorder. Years later, I wrote about this period of my life in a roman a clef, Forks in the Road:

Yet the reality of what was happening to the environment and people was horrific. I wondered how anyone could know the things we now knew and not go crazy. I had always been overly empathetic. (Or just plain pathetic.) As a child, I cried when they cut down trees on the lot next door to us. I mourned the loss of those trees for years. When my dog was run over by a car I was depressed for months; my mom finally took me to a doctor, and he gave me what he called pep pills. My psyche could not take the onslaught of constant horror. 

Could anyone’s? 

On the Oregon coast, I began to fall apart.

One day I heard a bird cry out. A strange call. I went to the window and looked down at the sidewalk leading to our door. On the cement, half a snake twitched. It was so grotesque. Horrific in a way that only real life can be. I stood watching it for a while, wondering how it got there, finally realizing a bird had most likely dropped half of the snake as it flew over. The snake had lost its mind--and half its body. 

Soon after I lost my mind. 

Me, middle-class white chick, began exhibiting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I thought I was going insane. I could not read for a time; the letters kept moving on the page--and besides, the ideas were frightening. I had an anxiety attack that lasted a year. I hallucinated. 

A doctor told me I was allergic to the world. 

Whatever that meant. 

The world was poison and my body was like a map of those poisons--or a container for poisons, he said.

No, no, I screamed silently. The world is more than poisons; I am more than poisons.

“You are like the canary in the mine,” he said.

No. I refuse to be a fucking canary, singing the blues before dropping dead in my cage, feet sticking straight up to the sky.

I looked over at Em as we sat in the natural foods co-op in Nebraska. What if we had never lived on the coast, never worked at the co-op, or joined the peace movement, how would our lives be different? 

I doubted I had affected any change as a result of my actions in the peace movement. I gained knowledge. And got sick. Were the two related? 

Maybe when the biblical Eve ate the proverbial apple--acquired knowledge--she got sick. She left paradise because she could not bear to live in Eden when so many people outside suffered. 

Or she ate the apple, gained knowledge, and lost faith. She no longer believed in an omniscient, omnipotent God. How could she? If he was omniscient and omnipotent, how could he allow such suffering? And if he did allow it, he was a mean evil sonofabitch. She wouldn’t want to believe in him. 

So she swallowed the apple, threw up ignorance, and slithered away to be her own goddess--and became a pariah of the dominant culture. 

Had she ever wondered what would have happened had she stayed in paradise? Could there be paradise with ignorance? Or was paradise only possible with ignorance? 

Had Eve ever wondered about her choices?

I broke during that period of my life. Just like my mother had. Like her, I never recovered. And soon my life completely revolved around getting back to what I had been. Getting back to who I had been.

But that was an impossible task. We can never be what we were. Every single one of us has to endure something we wish we could avoid. 

I am a different than I would have been because of what has happened to me. Before, I was brilliant. I was beautiful. I thought I could do absolutely anything. I was going to save the world.

After I wished the world would save me. I am no longer brilliant, at least not in the way I was. My mind isn’t as quick as before. I was an amazing short story writer before. Now I can’t seem to go to that deep place in a short piece of writing--it’s too painful. I need to build up to it, which I can do when I write a novel. I would have never written The Jigsaw Woman before. Or The Church of the Old Mermaids. Certainly not Ruby’s Imagine.

I knew more people before. I was better at relationships. Better in crowds. 

Or maybe I wasn’t. Who knows?

It doesn’t actually matter. 

Lately I’ve realized I have been focused on my wound. I thought because I tried to ignore it, because I didn’t talk about it to family and friends, because I only wrote about it for people who were mostly strangers, because of all that, I figured I wasn’t someone who was wallowing in my wounded-ness. I didn’t blame my parents or my childhood. I felt angry and sad for moments of time, but then I would stuff those feelings as far down as I could. 

I mean, really, what good would it do to feel anything?

Don’t go deep, just stay in the shallows.

I’ve been wondering lately if perhaps as a culture we just don’t go deep. We stay in the shallows. Because it is unseemly to feel things. And especially to feel things and then talk about them.

I’m not sure I feel much of anything these days except bad.

And that ain’t good.

I hear this from many people.

Many beautiful things happen every day of my life. It seems stingy not to feel joy at my fortune. But I think feelings just got in the way: How many years can one feel BAD. If we give away one feeling (the bad feeling), maybe the others go away, too? 

Perhaps that is the greatest journey, the greatest task, to find again the treasure of our feelings.

Or at least my feelings.

When I was young, I believed I was put on this earth to love. I knew this was true because I was so good at it. Good at loving. 

I’m not sure how good I am at it any more. Yet when I do feel that rush of love now, I feel completely WELL. Whole. Holy.

Some days I’m not sure how to put one foot in front of another. When I have no answers. When I can’t let go and just be. I am so uncomfortable. 

Perhaps I need to feel love for my suffering. Perhaps suffering is like some kind of monstrous parent trying to help us get through life.

Pick another way, strange parental unit.

I am tired of my wound. I don’t want to pick at it any longer. I don’t want to focus on it. 

Perhaps I will go treasure hunting instead. Maybe learn to find treasure within. 

And without.

Today I found some kind of aloe vera plant growing near the house here. I love aloe vera plants. I can’t count how many times this plant has healed a part of my body. This particular plant, or bunch of plants, was blooming. I had never seen an aloe vera plant blooming and I was impressed. Coming up from the plump succulent leaves was a stalk and then apricot-colored trumpet-like blossoms fell away from the stalk. This plant was decidedly sexual. I grasped the closed blossoms in one hand and I could feel a kind of pulsing—throbbing? I smiled. Yep. I leaned over and felt the plump dark green leaves, carefully avoiding the tiny spikes on the edges. 

I went and got Mario, and we stood together next to the plant. While we were gazing at the plant, we heard the unmistakable whirr of a hummingbird, but when we looked toward it, it flew away and sat on a nearby cholla tree. She watched us, her head going back and forth, back and forth. I leaned against Mario, and without a word, we stepped back a bit, giving the hummingbird a clearer view of her intended: the aloe vera blossoms. Then we stayed very still. I closed my eyes and told her we intended no harm. We were peaceful, peaceful, peaceful. 

Several minutes later, she flew toward us and the aloe vera blossoms. She dipped her beak up into this blossom and that blossom, her iridescent green feathers catching the sunlight on this cold morning. I stayed close to Mario, feeling his warmth and familiar heft. I listened to the hummingbird’s wings—brrr, brrr, brrr. And I felt such joy and love. Love for this powerful little bird, for the sensual plant, for the earth beneath my feet and the blue, blue sky above, and for the man next to me. 

Ahhh.

What a gift. 

It felt good.

  

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A Year and A Day of Living the Old Mermaids Way

I've got another post up on living the Old Mermaids Way.

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Old Mermaids Journal

Don't forget to check out the Old Mermaids Journal blog now and again. I'm trying to be better about posting there regularly, especially now that I'm doing A Year and a Day of Living the Old Mermaids Way.

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The Rift is Published!

I'm happy to report that The Rift is now published in e-book form and will soon be in print, too. Here are some FAQ, including how the book came to be. Enjoy! 

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Beginnings

Here's a new post.

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Visions of...Old Mermaids

I am asking more than usual this question: What would the Old Mermaids do? I asked that after I came home exhausted from looking for a car. I said, "What would the Old Mermaids do?" And I got an immediate answer: “They wouldn't have a car." I grumbled about how unrealistic that was, given where I live. But reality is: I like driving. I am rarely as happy as I am when I'm in my car, alone, driving down the highway. My happiest moment in recent years was when I drove from Santa Barbara to Phoenix. I was free of any anxiety: I knew everyone I loved was safe for the moment and I didn't have to save anyone or anything. I drove along the ocean, alone in the car, ecstatic.

Remember in Koyaanisqatsi when they showed the highways and biways and people running to and fro and we were supposed to think that was ugly and out of balance? I didn't think it was ugly. I thought it was beautiful. I thought the nature scenes were beautiful, too. I think our human need to create is natural and glorious human, but once we recognize our creations are a little bit too Frankenstein's monster, we have an obligation to the world to change what we've created—or destroy what we created.

This is the long way of saying that after a few days of grumbling about how unrealistic the Old Mermaids were, I was walking around town, up above the river, breathing in autumn, and I had a vision of the near future. I thought of all the books I’d written and stories I told. Most of them are about finding home. (I think I ended three books with the word “home” without consciously knowing it.) I imaginatively build amazing structures and communities. I am creating home with my novels.

I love to drive because I am on the move, always on the move. Because I am searching for home. I am not comfortable in my body, my house, my place in the world. Sometimes I think it’s because when I was a girl—a wild child, nature’s child running in the woods barefoot and disheveled most hours of the day—my grandparents sold the land next door to us, the land where my Lullabye Forest grew.

The new owners came in and cut down my woods. I was bereft. I have no conscious memory of the destruction, by the way. I just remember my life before and after. And after I felt homeless. But this may just be a story I tell myself. I was probably born this way: squirmy, crying out in raw unexplained grief when I was only an infant, always asking, asking, asking too many question. Railing against injustice like a little Irish Don Quixote, my Rocinante my dog—who got run over by a car when I was 12. (And I was in such terrible grief over his death that my parents took me to a doctor and he gave me tranquilizers.)

It doesn’t matter why I felt homeless or why I’ve felt homeless for much of my life. It is a modern ailment, I suspect. We have lost the songs of our ancestors, perhaps. Maybe when my relatives came to this land, we left behind our faeries—or the spirits of our ancestors. Maybe we’ve gone deaf to the songs of the land all around us. Perhaps we can’t hear our own siren songs any more. I don’t really know.

But as I was walking around my town, I had a vision of the near future—a future where I wouldn’t need a car, at least not often. I could see a home, a place, a purpose, and I suddenly felt completely at home with this vision, this idea. As if all of my life had been heading toward THIS. When I told Mario about it, he said, “Don’t tell anyone yet. Don’t research it. Don’t study it. Just dream it for a while, the way you would dream a novel.” Aaaah, exactly what the Old Mermaids would do. (I am so fortunate that my sweetheart is an Old Mermaid.)

Now I sit looking out into the cloudy day. Sunlight edges the clouds like a glorious silver white lining. I’m listening to Train sing Drops of Jupiter. About a woman flying through the stars. I am no star being. I am of this Earth. I have been chronically ill for a long time. I am sick of it. Truly. Someone once said that all sickness is homesickness. In my case, I believe this to be true. I know where my home is. It isn’t the stars. It isn’t even in my imagination. It isn’t someplace ELSE. I can see it now, feel it now—more than ever. This Earth is home. It is my place. It is my Beloved. Each of us is the Earth. Walking, dancing, singing, loving Earths. Each of us is the Beloved. Each of you is my Beloved.

As for my vision of my future? Well, it is still in the dreaming stages, and I will share more as time goes on.

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The Making of Whackadoodle Times

(I continue here with my series of "the making of" my novels, taken from my Weird and Wonderful Gazette. Enjoy!)

Whackadoodle Times was originally born out of my frustration over the state of the world and the apparent obliviousness of most of the population about what dire straits we’re in. But, of course, I can’t write novels from a soapbox. Can anyone? Still, I thought it would be fun to write an allegory or satire or blend them together to have an allegorical satire. In any case, we don’t have to label it. Let’s just call it a novel. I was initially poking fun at our culture’s obsession with celebrities and the apparent obliviousness of the rich to the plight of almost anyone else, but in the end what happened was that I wrote a story about Brooke McMurphy, a woman in trouble.

I wrote the first chapter several years ago. I loved the first chapter—just as I had with Butch. And just like with Butch, I got scared. Could I keep going and maintain the quality? I was also worried about length. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe the story should dictate the length, not the publisher. I tend to write short novels. I knew if I wrote a short novel, I probably couldn’t get a traditional publisher to publish it. But the world changed between the time I started Whackadoodle Times and when I finished it. I was now an indie writer with a publisher who didn’t care about length. Yes!

The novel begins when a bag lady comes to the house of two screenwriters and says she will do one great thing a day for them if they’ll let her stay in their guest cottage. When I started the novel, I was going to have the story revolve around that one great thing a day. After I wrote the first chapter, I began to worry about how I’d come up with one great thing a day. That was another reason I put the novel away for several years. When I brought it out to continue working on it, I just let the story evolve—which is what should always happen. The “one great thing a day” became an integral part of the story, not the focus of it.

Except for the first chapter, I ended up writing this novel at our winter retreat in Arizona. About eight years ago, I put out a call to friends to find a place in the Southwest where Mario and I could spend part of the winter writing and soaking up some sun instead of getting soaked by the Pacific Northwest rain. Terri Windling responded and told me about a retreat near Tucson, Arizona, for writers and artists and other creatives. That winter, we packed up our car and headed out to Tucson.

Going to this retreat has saved my life in so many ways; I don’t have the words to express my gratitude for its existence. Every part of it was designed with purpose, in beauty. When I’m there, my prayer every morning is a version of the Navajo Beauty Way; I often chant, “I walk in beauty before me, I walk in beauty beside me, I walk in beauty behind me, I walk in beauty all around me.” In the last few years, I have had a creative opening, and now stories flow very quickly from me. I believe being on retreat in Arizona every year is responsible for that, in part.

The second year I was at the retreat, I wrote Church of the Old Mermaids. This novel changed my life and continues to change my life because 13 of the characters—the Old Mermaids—are now a part of my everyday life. They are more like guardians or spirit helpers than characters in a novel. I’ve now written several novels where the Old Mermaids and kin make an appearance. (Besides Church of the Old Mermaids, there’s The Blue Tail, The Fish Wife, The Desert Siren, along with The First Book of Old Mermaids Tales and the as yet unpublished An Old Mermaid Sanctuary.)

I digress. We were talking about Whackadoodle Times. I wrote Whackadoodle Times while I was on retreat in Arizona. Once I had the characters, the story began flowing. At first, the tone was different from anything I’d done in a long while. Brooke isn’t a happy person. Her wit can be acerbic, but she was so funny that I didn’t care. The story was at times sexually graphic, too. I’ve written sexually explicit scenes before, but what happens in Whackadoodle Times is more realistic than romantic, so it could seem crude and rude to some. But that was what made it funny to me.

I never laughed as much as I did writing this novel, and in the end, I never cried so much. Although my life couldn’t be more different from hers, I understand her: I understand getting to a place in your life and wondering how the hell did I get here. 

I also understand her life because she’s in the entertainment business, and so am I. When the studio head (the stud) is trying to convince her to script doctor Zombie Town and make zombies sexy, I’m laughing at the absurdity, but I’ve been a part of very similar conversations over the year. I often think of the scene in Gypsy where the strippers are telling Gypsy “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” Yep, sexy zombies are the gimmick the studios want from Brooke. Writers are often asked to come up with some kind of “gimmick” in order to get their work published. It’s not a particularly inspiring way to create!

Anyway, I had fun writing this novel. I hope you enjoy reading it. I plan on writing two more novels in the Whackadoodle Times universe. The second one will probably be called Whackadoodle Times Two. I’ve got the story. Maybe I’ll write it when I go to Arizona this year, knock wood.

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The Making of Butch

I don’t remember exactly where I got the idea for Butch. She just came to me, like characters often do, ready to tell me her story. 

I love New Mexico. I often think of it as my “soul home,” so I was thrilled to be able to tell a New Mexican story again. (Much of Mercy, Unbound takes place in New Mexico.) Here’s a secret about Butch that I think is funny. I originally thought Butch would have lots of sex scenes. Butch is a sensual woman. She lives large: lots of booze, lots of lovin’, lots of trouble. The book went its own way, however, and most of the sex is off stage! 

But that’s getting ahead of the story. I had the idea for Butch. Then I wrote the first chapter. I loved it. I thought it was one of the best first chapters I’d ever written. I got scared. I wasn’t sure I could make the rest of the book stand up to that first chapter. (See what I mean about having self-talk that is not helpful.) 

A few years went by. I kept wanting to get back to it. Then I decided the real reason I wasn’t working on it was because I didn’t know enough about Taos, New Mexico, which is where the novel was set. I had to go back to Taos. (What a great excuse, eh?) 

I didn’t have enough money to go, so I decided to try doing a kickstarter. (They help fund various artistic projects.) I am notoriously bad about marketing my work. I loathe advertising. I could talk about my novels all day long. That’s not the problem. But I don’t want to be constantly shilling. For one thing, I haven’t found any method for selling books that works except one: word of mouth. When readers tell other readers about an author or a book they like, that sells books. Anyway, long way of saying that I didn’t get the word out. (I just don’t know that many people!) And I didn’t get enough pledges to fund the kickstarter to go to Taos. But the enthusiasm of those who did pledge helped boost my confidence. That helped open the gates of my imagination which allowed this creative thought to flow through: “You’re a writer, Kim. You make stuff up. Why be attached to a ‘real’ particular town? Remember Sosegado, Arizona.” 

(Sosegado, Arizona was the setting for much of Coyote Cowgirl. I’ve had quite a few readers ask me where it is so that they can visit. Sosegado is Spanish for peaceful, tranquil, etc. Although I “made it up,” I am convinced the town is out there somewhere.) 

Of course! Butch needed her own town, one that wasn’t tied to so-called reality. The town immediately came to me, just like one of my characters: Santa Tierra, New Mexico. Although the name literally means “saint earth,” I translate it to mean “sacred earth.” 

Like many of the places in my novels, Santa Tierra is a vital and important part of the story. It is a character in the novel, and it certainly has its own character. 

Once I had the town, I was ready to start again. I enjoyed writing this book immensely. In the novel, Butch has many mysteries to solve, but the greatest mystery is the one of her own origins. She is not a very reflective person, so trying to figure out her life is problematic for her. I was quite moved to learn the truth of her life. She endured a rough childhood. She had to make some tough decisions when she was still a girl. I admire her and would love her for a best friend. 

I intend to write several other Butch novels. I want to spend more time at Wayward Ranch with TomA and Patrick and their daughter, Hunter. I want to ride through the Blood Mountains with Butch and George. I want to eat breakfast with Marigold and Butch while they flirt with one another. I want to know if Jezebel will show up again. (I want to know about all kinds of things that I can’t mention here or I might spoil the story for you.)

Wayward Art Spectacle

One of my favorites parts of Butch is the Wayward Art Spectacle. Every year in Santa Tierra, after the ditch cleaning is over, TomA and Patrick (Trick) sponsor the Wayward Art Spectacle on their ranch. Everything in the novel leads up to the Wayward Art Spectacle, but I don’t have a lot of description of the actual Spectacle. Originally I had a couple of pages of description, but it stopped the narrative cold. So it got cut. Now there’s just a couple paragraphs, but I’m hoping it’s enough to give the flavor of the Spectacle. 

Every year, artists from all over the area bring their art to Wayward Ranch. The art is displayed around the ranch—mostly near the house and barns. Some of the art is hung inside the house, but most of it is outside. There are wooden mobiles hanging from trees. Quilts are draped over bushes. Metal sculptures are scattered throughout the pastures, like frozen wild animals. It’s magical and mystical and earthy. 

The genesis of the Wayward Art Spectacle was probably my own Hallows Art Show which was sponsored at our house. (We renamed our house The Little Yellow House Art Gallery for a month.) 

I came up with the idea for the Hallows Art Show after feeling as though my art had been rebuffed at an art show here in town. I decided to turn our little rental house into an art gallery for a month. It was part of my nearly lifelong effort to gatecrash and thumb my nose at gatekeepers. I believe everyone is creative, and art is in the eye and heart of the beholder. I don’t want a couple dozen people in New York (or anywhere) deciding what the rest of the country reads, and I don’t want a couple dozen people anywhere deciding what is and isn’t art. 

So I invited people from all over my community (and beyond) to participate in the Hallows Art Show. The theme was Hallows (Halloween, honoring the ancestors, death and rebirth). People brought their art to my house. I “hung” the show, and then we had a gallery opening. The show stayed in the house for the month, and people could come and walk through the “gallery” by appointment. 

We had jewelry hung here and there, alongside beautiful scarves. One artist created a Day of the Dead altar in my room. In another room, we had a long dinner table that was set for a Dumb Supper. Different artists created different place settings for it. (That was AMAZING!) My father made a gorgeous Halloween quilt, and my mother made a matching beautiful Halloween pillow. We had paintings all over the house, too. 

It was one of the most amazing events of my life. At the end of it, one of the artists—a local retired dentist—gave us a piece of colored glass we still have hanging in one of our windows. A weaver gave us one of her baskets. And I curl up under my father’s Hallows quilt nearly every day. (In fact, it’s getting a little frayed.) 

So that was partly where the Wayward Art Spectacle came from. But also, it sprang up from the New Mexican soil. When I think of New Mexico, I think of beauty and art. 

I first visited New Mexico many years ago when I was in the midst of a heated battle with the county and some of my neighbors over pesticide use. I felt like I was surrounded by people who didn’t care about the land or nature or beauty or art. I was exhausted from the fight. Mario and I decided to visit New Mexico during this time. 

We arrived in Taos after a seventeen hour drive from Kingman, Arizona. (I don’t remember why it took that long.) It was dark when we drove down the dirt road toward the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. Our headlights skimmed over a painted adobe fence and I glimpsed a mermaid swimming. (My first mermaid in the desert.) A few moments later, we reached the house, found our room, and fell to sleep, exhausted. 

In the morning, I stepped out into the bright day and looked up at the bluest sky I had ever seen. I walked across a courtyard where Georgia O’Keeffe, D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, Ansel Adams, and so many others had walked. Huge cottonwood trees towered over me. My knees nearly buckled. Everywhere I turned, I was surrounded by beauty. I could hear the whispers of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Here they talked about things that mattered to me. Here they honored beauty, nature, and art. 

That was my first encounter with New Mexico, and the spirit of that encounter carries over into the Wayward Art Spectacle—and into all of Butch.

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The Making of Jewelweed Station

(This was originally published in Kim's Weird & Wonderful Gazette. I write about each of the books that were published over the last six months. I do have a FAQ page for Jewelweed Station, but here I write in a little more depth about what was going on as I began to write this book. Enjoy!)

Jewelweed Station was inspired by the Scarlet Pimpernel which was a favorite book of mine when I was young. For one thing, I was impressed that this man could let himself be seen as a fool when he was really a hero. I never liked appearing foolish. I still don’t. Yet for a greater cause, he was able to pretend to be someone he wasn’t—someone who was pretty loathsome.  I wanted to write an American version of the Scarlet Pimpernel only I wanted the main character to be younger, maybe even a teen. When I asked myself what was the American equivalency of the Reign of Terror, I immediately thought of slavery.

I had studied the Underground Railroad in depth on other occasions. I knew there was no historical evidence that white Southerners participated in the Underground Railroad. In fact, most of the participants on the Underground Railroad were freed and escaped slaves, as far as historians know.  

History is an avocation of mine. It was one of my minors in college. And this is what I know for certain: We know only a fraction of the truth about history. Even our own history. Think about your own life. If someone were to write a history of your life, just what you did over the last month, what would they write? They’d have to trust what you told them, first off, and you’d  probably only tell them about the big events—if there were any—and you’d probably only tell them about the big events you thought were socially acceptable.

In other words, most of our history is left out of history books. As a writer, I do research, but then I let my imagination take over. And there’s no one alive who can contradict me in the case of Jewelweed Station. If things were done in secret, how would we ever know? If a person in the South wanted to help slaves escape, she would have to be extremely secretive because to do otherwise would put herself and her family and descendants in jeopardy.

So Calantha “Callie” Carter was born. She wasn’t as young as I originally thought she would be, mostly because she’d have to have some maturity to be part of the Underground Railroad. Plus I wanted her to be old enough for a romance with a young man, not a boy. 

Originally I wanted this book to be a fun adventure. Callie would pretend she was stupid while she was really doing great things behind the scenes. I soon realized that realistically Callie would be under some very tight restrictions because her parents were dead and because she was a young Southern woman with very little autonomy. So this wasn’t going to be easy for Callie.

She was young and inexperienced and used to getting her own way. I wanted her to try many things and fail. That seemed realistic to me. Naiveté can be a dangerous thing.

There were other reasons it couldn’t be a fun adventure. Slavery is not an adventure. The more research I did, the more the realities of slavery turned my stomach. For a time, I didn’t think I could write the book. I didn’t want to make slavery “entertaining.” I didn’t want to be exploitive.

Eventually, I realized I could write the book if it wasn’t a simple adventure story. It became a complex story about a young woman finding her true self and coming to terms with her family history and the terrible history of her own community. She has to decide—just like I think we all have to decide—how to deal with injustice: Does she stand up or does she fall down?

She tries to stand up for a long time and she keeps falling down. But she won’t let people be abused in her name. She has to learn to be strong and humble at the same time.

This story had twists and turns in it that I didn’t expect. This always happens when I’m writing, and I think it’s one of the reasons I love to write so much. I won’t tell you about those twists here, of course, since I don’t want to spoil to the story for you.

Although Jewelweed Station is a complete story, I am planning two other books with these characters. We’ll see how it goes!

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