More Than Our Bodies

Sunset in Baja (photo by Dave)

Next to "It's benign" and "the margins are clear," hearing "it's not broken" is the freaking greatest news.

Two weeks ago I took a bad spill and messed up my ankle. Initial x-rays were inconclusive. I had no idea that sometimes a break won't show up for a week or two after a trauma. So...today I went back for another x-ray.

I was trying not to catastrophize. But we are supposed to take the long drive up Baja in two weeks to get to a housesit in California and I was wondering how that would work with a broken ankle...much less one that might need surgery.

Bizarrely, in the past days, THREE friends have fallen off their bikes and suffered compound arm fractures that required surgery.

I just keep reminding myself that a) the body knows how to heal, and b) we've faced a lot of surprises and unknowns in this nomadic life we live, and we're always able to figure things out.

My mantra has been LOVE on the in-breath and HEALING on the out-breath. One of my arm-healing friends said this helped her a lot, too. It's so soothing that I think I will continue to use it, especially to help me get to sleep. 

So today I went back for the second x-ray...and, yay, it's a bad sprain, not a break. Doc told me to start walking with the boot. I did immediately when I got home. It's like being half non-automated robot. But I'll take it.

My 50s have been quite a ride for my body, what with brain surgery (for a benign tumor), thyroid surgery (for a benign tumor that had initially been diagnosed as cancer), surgery on my leg to remove a squamous cell growth (clear margins), and now this.

In Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying, Ram Dass talks about how if we live long enough, all of us face physical changes. This is an opportunity to learn we are "more than our bodies and our minds."

This decade has been teaching me this, it seems. 

"Fruit is so sexy": Writing and the Body.

As part of my series on Books That Inspire, I had a chat with the inspirational--dare I say, luscious goddess?--Gayle Brandeis. Read on for some inspiring words about how to love your body and jump-start your writing.

Me: Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write is such a juicy, gorgeous book. It inspires us to write and live with our senses wide open. You start the book with a revelation you had in high school that involves a strawberry. And one of your novels, Delta Girls, features a fruit-picking character and begins with a discussion of pears. I call myself a "fruit bat" because I love fruit so much. What is it with fruit? What makes it such an important element (literally and metaphorically) in life and writing?

Gayle: Thank you so much, Kate—always nice to find a fellow fruit bat! I’ve loved fruit all my life, and it’s long felt connected to language for me. When I was in third grade, my teacher gave our class “succulent” as a vocabulary word; I had a pear for a snack after school that day, and told my mom “My, what a succulent pear”. It made me very happy to use my new word, and not just because it made my mom gasp; the word felt just as juicy in my mouth as the pear. Fruit is so sexy, its seeds so full of potential—the perfect metaphor for both writing and our bodies. 

Fruitflesh is filled with wonderful--and often surprising--writing activities. Have you done every writing activity in this book? Which one or two are your favorites? And if you took your own advice and wrote on your body, what did you write?

I did indeed test drive every single exercise in the book. The ones that have had the most staying power for me are all the sensory-based prompts. I use them often in my workshops, asking my students to write so the reader can feel/taste/see/smell/hear the words on the page. And Dictionary Poems: crack open a dictionary at random, close your eyes and point to a word, then write a poem around that word. It’s still something I turn to if I’m not sure what to write. If I recall correctly—it’s been a while—I wrote just one word on my body: YES.

You write, "There are many ways of knowing. Our bodies have great imaginations." How can we hear what our bodies are "imagining" or telling us? How does that translate to the page?

I find that our bodies’ imaginations come into play the most when we’re writing fiction, or accessing memory in our work. I do an exercise with my fiction students where I have them close their eyes and check in to their own bodies; once they’re really grounded inside their own skin, we start to morph into all sorts of other bodies—we imagine ourselves as a three year old boy, a 90-year-old woman, a 400 pound man, a dolphin, a hummingbird, etc.—and then we write about the experience. It’s our bodies’ sense of kinesthetic empathy that allows us to imagine what it’s like to live in other bodies, that allows us to access the “other” in our work—it’s the same sense that allows us to feel what it must be like to be running when we watch the Olympics, or that makes us cringe when someone falls down, as if we can feel it in our own body. When we tap into the body’s intelligence and imagination, we become more compassionate--since the root of the word means “to suffer with,” and when we fully can imagine being in another person’s skin, we can more deeply connect with their suffering. And yes, if we just get quiet and listen to our own bodies, we can learn so much about our own stories.
 

The book is geared toward women. Have you ever talked with a man who read it? What was his reaction?

Several men have told me they’ve gotten a lot out of Fruitflesh, which makes me happy; they said they just skipped over the parts they felt didn’t apply to them. When I first envisioned this project, I wasn’t planning to gear it toward women—the book was originally titled Writing From the Body, and I thought I had this great, fresh approach to writing, but then a book called Writing From the Body written by John Lee came out when I was about halfway through the first draft, and I was devastated; I felt as if my life’s work had been taken from me. Eventually I realized there was still room for my voice, and I decided to distinguish my project by focusing on women writers. I was very happy to do this; I thought the book offered a great opportunity to help break through the damaging messages we receive about our bodies as women, to help us appreciate our bodies and the stories they can tell.

You write, "Being a person can be embarrassing." I once heard memoirist Joe Loya say, "In order to write a memoir, we have to be willing to be embarrassed." How do you allow yourself to be vulnerable on the page?

That hasn’t been easy for me. Even around the time I wrote Fruitflesh, I was less willing to embarrass myself on the page than I probably would have admitted. I think it’s helped to get older and not care so much what other people think. It’s helped to feel as if I can own my own story, including my bad decisions and deeply human flaws. It’s helped to not need to be seen as “perfect” I am a recovered perfectionist, and as Anne Lamott says, “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” Also, reading other writers who are able to be vulnerable on the page has given me courage to lay my own life bare. 

You write, "Writing involves listening. Deep listening. We need to quiet ourselves so we can hear the world around us in a true, clear way." In such a busy, noisy world, how do you focus on deep listening? What advice can you give to other writers?

This is not easy to do—I definitely have more trouble doing it now than when I wrote the book 15 years ago; the constant lure of social media has dramatically affected my ability to slow down and listen deeply. But it’s so necessary—for my sanity and my writing—to take time to just breathe, and check in with my body and feel really grounded in the moment. This can happen while going for a walk through the forest, or just sitting and closing my eyes for a few minutes, or dancing like a wild woman and feeling as if my body is taking me exactly where it needs to go—anything that gets me to that place of receptivity only enriches my writing (and my experience as a person!)

It seems that in your ruminations, the body, sexuality/the libido, and creativity/writing are all intertwined. Why do you think this is? Why is it important for women writers to tap into these interconnections?

Our culture teaches us as women to see ourselves at war with our bodies, to feel as if we’re somehow lacking or “wrong” if we don’t fit the airbrushed media ideal. When I wrote Fruitflesh, I think I was reminding myself, and hoping I could remind other women, that we don’t need to listen to our culture’s damaging messages, that we can start to love and accept our bodies as they are and tap into our physicality as a source of creativity and wisdom and power, that we can remove shame from our narratives of desire and sex, that we can claim our full experience, let desire fuel us in the world and on the page.  I wish I could say that writing the book led me to love and accept my body all the time, that I never fall prey to body insecurities, but that wouldn’t be honest; I still struggle at times with body image, still measure myself negatively against that ridiculous ideal. Fruitflesh continues to help me, though. I read my own words and find myself teaching myself what I need to learn all over again. The book helps remind me to forget about how I look and focus on how I feel inside my skin, to write from that juicy, painful, experiential place.

You are the author of Fruitflesh, four novels, and a poetry chapbook--as well as stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in an impressive array of journals. You are currently finishing up a memoir and are co-editing an anthology about suicide loss. And on top of it all, you have children, a husband, and you teach for three programs: Sierra Nevada College, the Incarcerated Student Program through Lake Tahoe Community College, and the low residency MFA program at Antioch in L.A. How is this humanly possible? Ha. What I really want to know is: How do you structure your life so you have time to write?

I don't! I am kind of structure averse, actually--I'm much more of a go with the flow kind of person. Of course I need to stick to schedules for class times, etc., but in terms of fitting everything in, somehow I have an intuitive sense of what needs to get done when and I try to give my attention as fully as possible to whatever task is at hand and not get too overwhelmed by everything else that needs to get done. I fit the writing in whenever and wherever I can--I don't have a set writing schedule; I just take advantage of little windows in my day, and those windows can feel spacious even if they're small. Sometimes 15 minutes of furious writing can be more productive than a full day of staring at the screen.

 

Gayle Brandeis has been awarded the Bellwether Prize and a Silver Nautilus Book Award. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014. She lives in Tahoe. Check out her website: www.gaylebrandeis.com.
 

What I Learned This Epic Year

Swimmable water in Cerritos Beach, Baja California Sur

Breathe in the precious moments and love fiercely.

This has become my mantra during an epic year--a year in which I stared down life and death.

It was a year that reminded me how way leads onto way. How everything is a catalyst. How what we focus on blossoms. How it's not about what happens--but what we think about (and do with) what happens.

Funny how I thought retiring after spending my whole life in schools would be 2013's "big event." But then my mentor, friend and "other mother" died. I was blessed to witness her profoundly graceful transition.

And then months later--when I myself was perched on the edge of dying during my seizure--she visited me. She told me that the veil between this world and the next is thinner than we think. She said if we look closely, we can penetrate the mystery's deepest beauty. She said never to be afraid of death. There's nothing to fear. Even from the next realm, she continued to teach me.

Even though I've been witness to the death of many beloveds--including my parents--the thought of my own death seemed theoretical. But 2013 brought me this gift: a deep, bodily knowledge that I'm transitory in this form. That everything changes. That I will die.

So what to do with this gift? Breathe in the precious moments and love fiercely! I was already on this path in August when my brain tumor was discovered. Months before, Dave and I had packed up everything we owned and traveled to Australia, Southern California, Boston, Cape Cod.

And then the experience of brain surgery and healing--enveloped in vast love and support from family and friends--intensified my desire to live my most authentic life. I launched Operation: Seize the Day!

Living your truth is not for wimps. It involves taking risks: emotionally, physically, financially. It involves being comfortable with spontaneity, with unknowing.

It requires loosing the moorings. When I let go of my job, my house, my neighborhood, my town--indeed, my identity as a Santa Cruzian writing professor--I plunged into a free-float.

I decided to embrace the fertile void.

I decided to reside in a rich space of unknowing.

In this space, I watched my monkey mind. It scrambled around like a kid desperate for a parent's attention: Hey! What are you doing? You're no longer a teacher, you're not a parent, you're not anything! What are you contributing? Aren't you being aimless and irresponsible?

When that happened, I'd gently turn toward my larger self, the sky mind, the god-voice in me who is always deeply present when I open my heart. It always says:  No need to worry, no need to fear. You're valuable, just like everyone else, because you exist. And the more you're YOU, living your truth, the more you inspire. Don't set out to have an effect--just be it. Trust that the fertile void will reveal your answers.

Because we no longer had a house, I was curious what my experience with "home" would be. My deepest realization so far: my home for this lifetime is my body. If I want to be truly alive, I must unconditionally love this marvelous, self-healing spacesuit.

Especially after having my skull cracked open and resealed with glue and staples, I can feel myself reaching new levels of bodily appreciation. While I don't have this love-thy-body-thing totally in the bag, I find it easier and easier to release criticism of my body. To relax into myself and feel life from the inside out. As a result, I'm experiencing new levels of sensory bliss (as well as relief from my occasional claustrophobia).

And wow was that infinite intelligence right-on when it said to trust that answers will appear. In late August, a thought popped into my head:

I want to live within walking distance of swimmable water.

That thought wasn't a conscious creation of my construction. It was a fully formed object like a stone, a heartbeat, a breath.

I have always loved water. I'm a spiritual mermaid, a former synchronized swimmer, a snorkeler, a lover of boats and kayaks and plunging into seas and lakes.

When I pondered my "swimmable water" revelation, I found myself wrangling with it: Did this mean when we decide to settle down again that I'd want a swimming pool? Did I need to join a gym with a pool? Was it a call to buy a place in our beloved Hawaii? But we'd have to win the lottery to afford a Hawaii pad within walking distance of the beach!

I decided to let it go. To trust. To allow the answer to appear as easily as the desire did.

All I have to say is this: releasing to the universe is magic!

Organically, the perfect opportunity arose: to buy an outrageously affordable casita in El Pescadero Mexico (near Todos Santos in Baja California Sur). Yes, it's walking distance to a lovely, swimmable beach. And it's in a small resort that has a swimming pool and a jacuzzi. Water, water everywhere!

The icing on the cake is that some close friends have bought the place next to ours. Built-in community.

We don't know if this will be our temporary or permanent residence. We don't have the details nailed down. We are trusting our guts. We want to ride the wave of the unfolding.

As 2013 comes to a close, we are back in California after a trip to Hong Kong, India and Sri Lanka. I'm looking forward to processing that transformative adventure while I focus on writing in the new year.

It looks like we will be headed to Mexico in May. Before that--for the first four months of 2014--we will live in Tahoe. We are thrilled we can host family and friends there who have opened their homes and lives to us.

In a cozy house sheltered from the Sierra cold, I intend to write the first draft of my memoir about transformation. During that time, this blog will be on hiatus, and I will be less of a presence on Facebook.

I will also improve my skiing and yoga, practice my Spanish, work online with my writing clients, judge a book contest, and allow whatever else rolls my way to perfectly unfold.

Happy New Year to all of you. May you breathe in your precious moments and love fiercely.

"Your very flesh shall be a great poem." - Walt Whitman

Today.

Two weeks ago.

In the months before my seizure, I'd been thinking a lot about my body. Dave and I had given up our house and were living a traveling life, so I was becoming more and more aware of how my body is my true home.

Yet I've spent a lot of my life judging my body. I've been like an abusive spouse at times, berating my body for being too much this, or not enough that.  If I talked to other people the way my inner voice talked to my body, I'd be a cruel person.

So I began to wonder why I haven't been nicer to this amazing space suit that propels me through the world. All the judgments of the body create an agitation, an ongoing dissatisfaction, an inability to be fully at peace.

Any time I judged my body, it was as though I was trying to jail-break. Other times, the dissatisfactions with my body led to physically abusing it (extreme exercise) or numbing it (too much booze) or ignoring it (mind distractions).

I wanted to allow myself to comfortably inhabit my home.

To create a more gentle, peaceful relationship with my body, I began to focus on feeling myself from the inside. I meditated on my organs, thanking them for doing their work. I began to understand more deeply how my heart doesn't need me to beat it, how my digestion happens without my conscious effort, how my lungs would continue to breathe even if I was unconscious.

Maybe part of me knew what was coming:  Body Dwelling Smack Down! I was soon to face the biggest inhabiting-the-body challenge: Illness.

Due to the nature of brain surgery, I couldn't use avoid-my-body strategies. I had to give up alcohol and caffeine. I couldn't focus on screens:  no TV, no phone, no computer, no Kindle. I couldn't read. Even my beloved music hurt my head. The doctor went so far as to say, "Don't think too much. Let your mind rest."

I couldn't take a walk, do yoga, talk on the phone. I couldn't even escape into sleep because sleep was elusive.

It was a challenge from the universe:  Just be.

But be here? In this body that's been sliced open at the top? The one where the scalp has been peeled back and the skull drilled through? The one with a gap in the brain slowly filling with spinal fluid?

I could hear creaks and groans and pops in my head--like a house settling. But these noises weren't only "in my head." They were so loud, Dave could hear them too!

All that surgical poking around in the pre-motor region of my left brain affected my right hand. Two days after surgery, I couldn't hold a coffee cup or remove the toothpaste lid.

I had to decide:  Was this going to creep me out? Was I going to feel like a haunted house? Was I going to try to escape my body through dreadful thoughts? Was I going to freak out each time something made a weird noise or sensation? Was I going to go to the dark place and imagine there were so many things wrong?

Not that those thoughts never tried to creep in. But I consciously worked on cultivating the notion that nothing had gone wrong. That all was well. Even in the dark of night, waiting for dawn to light up the room, I deliberately dwelled inside.

Each noise in my head I recognized as healing. I thought, with awe, about how my brain and skull were adjusting to the new normal. How miraculous that it was all being held together with medical versions of glue and staples.

I thanked my right hand for all it had done for me over the years. I felt it from the inside-out. Lovingly, slowly, I touched each finger to my thumb, back and forth like playing scales on the piano. Like a child, I pressed Silly Putty in my fist. I thought about the miracle of my shaved hair beginning to sprout forth in just days like little leaves of grass.

Our bodies are constantly renewing. They say every seven years all of our cells are replaced. I am viscerally experiencing that renewal. A deep admiration for my body, my home, is blooming in me.


"Do anything, but let it produce joy."  - Walt Whitman

Wandering Spirit

Staples out.

The funniest thing someone said to me during my whole seizure-brain-tumor ordeal came from my reliably hilarious friend Scott. He said: "Sweetie, your life is just like Knots Landing these days."

As I was wheeled down the bright hospital hall, I saw looming over me Dave's loving face, a medical guy in scrubs, and the white institutional ceiling--like one of those point-of-view shots designed so you empathize with a doomed character. I laughed and said, "Wow, this really IS like Knots Landing!"

In the pre-op room, the anesthesiologist--looking like a hungover surfer--introduced himself and asked me a few questions. He then said, "I'm going to put a little in here to begin" and injected something into my IV. My eyes closed then opened. I thought, When are they going to get started? 

And then I saw Dr. Harraher, my surgeon, who told me the surgery was done. She said it went well except that she had to leave behind a microscopic "skin" of tumor attached to an artery (can't cut into that!). That's not really a problem since the tumor is benign, but if the little piece grows, she might recommend radiation.

I detected a tightness in my scalp, the former location of my little walnut. In its place, beneath the plate-reinforced skull, was now a hole slowly filling with spinal fluid, remarkably adapting to the new normal. I knew this because I heard creaks and groans and pops in my head, like a house settling.

Incredibly, a memory came to me--of something that happened during surgery. The best way I can describe it is this: My body was stoically enduring the breaking open of my head. And my spirit said something like, I'm outta here. I could be anywhere right now. I want to be free!

And my body--like a dog trainer, like a parent who knows best--sternly said to my spirit: "Stay!"

There I was, in post-op, giggling at the notion of my body ordering my spirit around. I suddenly understood myself more deeply. I've always had a wandering spirit and a pragmatic streak. They are very real parts of who I am. But I never realized my body had a mind of its own. 

And now I can see that there isn't a hierarchy of mind/body/spirit. They are more like interlinked circles. Even though the body eventually perishes, it's a super-duper space suit that allows for all kinds of groovy sensory experience that isn't possible without fingers and skulls and colons and noses and skin. And it's through sensory experience our spirit expands until it's onto the next thing. So at a key time, my body reminded my spirit of that: Hang around. You might get something out of this!

And oh yeah, my spirit is getting it. Its awe at what humans are capable of has expanded tenfold in the 10 days since my surgery. That post-op room was filled with medical technology and experience that had initiated from someone's thoughts. And then there was the energy directed to me that was palpable over the last weeks--thoughts, prayers, texts, emails, Facebook, you name it. The physical presence of doctors, nurses, aids, my husband, my sister...

I think what I'm getting at is this: What's been most striking about my experience has been the intricate interconnection of everything. The dazzling, pulsing design.

I spent one night in the hospital. After 14 hours, Dave went home for some well-deserved rest, and my friend Ellen came to spend the night with me. A woman with a gift for healing and soothing, she gave me an incredible foot rub. My sister Crystal had also given me one earlier in the day. People kept coming in and out of the room, checking me and the zillions of attached bodily tubes. 

All these ministrations made me feel like a queen--not of the soap opera type, but genuine royalty. Especially the sponge bath an angel of a night nurse gave to me at 6 a.m. She handled me so tenderly. 

I liked the idea that my body--so militaristic in standing up to my wandering spirit--could be vulnerable, could accept the gift of compassion, could relax and be home.

My spirit was happy. It curled in my body like a dog at the hearth.