Engaging the Larger World

A Qigong teacher, Lauren Hough's essays, and shelving relationships properly

Dear friends

I am going away soon for a few days but I wanted to stop here first. And let’s be honest, there are twelve million things to do before I go (including have the car vacuumed/vacuum it myself) so who *wouldn’t* rather pour herself a lemonade and gossip with her friends?¹

Natalie Goldberg says gossip is just “processing life” (I think she says this in Writing Down the Bones). I actually don’t like to verbally gossip much but man do I love to process life!

someone was carting around crocheted roosters this week with another rooster dangling from their rearview. highly approve!

Anyhoo, this morning I was reading a book called Honoring the Medicine: The Essential Guide to Native American Healing. I bought this book a long time ago - on my (accidental) babymoon, in fact, when I was pregnant with my first child and sick as a dog, riding around Montana on a roadtrip with my partner while huffing saltines and Sprite. It’s hard to point to one roadtrip in particular, but there are many photos of me in the front seat of a car, refusing to get out just then. When my spirit has had enough, she has had enough, no matter how pretty the terrain or overlook. My youngest proudly carries this mantle now, refusing to get out anywhere that doesn’t sell Blow Pops. Sadly, the ratio of good views to candy racks is pretty solidly an inverse one.

I hadn’t yet read Honoring the Medicine (Relatedly, the babies are doing fine! There are two of them now and the one responsible for my nausea on that trip has fully entered preening tweenship). This week, a somatics teacher I like referred to the author by his nickname - Ken Cohen - and I thought, Wait a minute. That book! That author! Also: Maybe I will finally crack that thing.

As a rule, I don’t like to talk about some kinds of books and those tend to be ones about healing or spirituality (or quantum physics). It’s too easy to dismiss and/or bungle texts like these and, in this case, Ken(neth) Cohen is not even an American Indian. He is, however, a teacher of Qigong and says he was taken under the wings of many Native American friends and elders who trained him. This is my way of apologizing that a) I’m about to excerpt a book I haven’t even read and b) that book discusses cultures and practices from which the author didn’t originate. But I can learn from almost anyone - unless you’re, like, a sargeant spitting in my face or a pilates teacher who is naturally thin - and while I have not actually read past the introducation of this book, I am looking forward to popping in and out of it through the next few months/years/deades.

more fun please

That’s right - this book will now live among the stacks that cover every surface of our home, read in piecemeal when people have a second. If you are a memoir or a novel, you have a better chance of me finishing you in a few sits, but if you are “proper nonfiction,” our relationship will take place across lifetimes. Sorry and you’re welcome!

Bleeding Skull is an actual medical term, most often discussed in parenting spheres. Could also refer to times you read too much online and think: I really need to get out of the house now . . .

tombstones were being sold for $1.25 which, anyone whose ever invested in a piece of granite can tell you, is a screamin good deal

Tim chuckles when journalists quote from the intro of a book because it looks like they didn’t read the whole thing (and they probably didn’t) but I do think I will actually read this book. Anyway, citing the problems of texts that take strictly anthropological, multidisciplinary, or New Age slants, Cohen writes of his own methodolgy for his book which he refers to as an integral one:

An integral methodology is base on personal experience, dialogue with peers, and scholarship. It is also interdisciplinary because it recognizes the holistic nature of Native American thinking and culture, in which subjects such as healing, worldview, ethics, lifestyle, geography, music, dance, art, politics, and prayer cannot be divided.

I like this idea that a piece of writing might be inseparable from music, dance, and prayer (and all the others, of course - geography, politics, and ethics). Cohen then mentions the book Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts, for which its author Greg Sarris sets the following goal:

[T]he writing, as much as possible, should reflect oral tendencies to engage the larger world in which the spoken word lives so that it is seen for what it might or might not be beyond the page.

This is the same goal Cohen has for his book (which I hope he meets - good luck, Ken!) and it reminded me, yes, of my the way my grandmother told stories.

my good friend Ken

For good reason, much is made of oral traditions in many cultures but especially in Native America. I’m not going to go into that now because it’s not my expertise and I don’t want to be a jackass. (First rule of the interwebs: don’t be a jackass!) But reading that description of Cohen’s methodology, I thought about something I had read in Lauren Hough’s collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, something over which I had laughed out loud.

Lauren is FUNNNEEE. I mean, spend one second with her newsletter Badreads and you will find talent dripping out her toes. I am often laughing when I read her stuff - I think about jokes she cracked hours, sometimes days, after I read them. Lauren grew up in a cult - her humor is particularly dry and cutting - but I like to believe she’d be entertaining people one way or another regardless of the pain she was put through as a child.

fall letting go of its chaotic childhood

And now, embarrassingly, I can’t find the passage I wanted, which I recall being about people who tell too many details in their anecdotes - relatives who circle around and around their point while telling you who is pregnant, who sold their house, who got a new job, etc. etc. which was how my grandmother’s stories always felt to me. As a mother and haggard person with fewer illusions, now I think maybe this is just the way stories want to be told. Maybe words need a raft of life under and behind and around them to safely make it across - from one being to another.

A normal person would delete the above intro of Lauren and post something without mentioning her, but I am not a normal person and I’m just going to type a different passage for you.² It’s one of my favorites and begins her essay called “The Slide”:

When I met Jay, he had a mustache and an accent like Julia Sugarbaker, if Julia Sugarbaker’d ever bragged her family owned a double-wide. He lost the mustache eventually. The accet never faded, but did help when I felt like strangling him, which was often. He’s the sort of freak who wakes up in a good mood and thinks singing Bette Midler’s “The Rose” at the top of his lungs will improve yours. . . . I ran into him at a gay bar in Columbia, South Carolina, after my own discharge [from the Air Force]. The first thing he said was, “Oh, Lord. Honey, what did you do to your hair?” The word “hair” had three syllables.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure, Julia Sugarbaker is one of the sassy, classy cadre of southern characters on the television show from the 80’s, Designing Women. Anyway, there you go. Lauren is hilarious and writes really well and I will always, always, appreciate a writer who can render a thick Southern accent without ridiculing or dismissing it.

sup bruh

Now I have to tell you something really quickly and then get outta here. I stumbled on a book this week in The Dollar Tree (don’t judge) by psychologist Rick Hanson. Hanson has a podcast I really enjoy called Being Well that he records with his son, Forrest. There is something so gentle about both of their voices and they sometimes interview interesting people. But mainly I just like their vibe: a psychologist dad and his podcasting son helping connect and correct topics of mental health and well being.

Making Great Relationships by Rick Hanson, PhD

I had recently been thinking, I really like Rick as a podcaster. Maybe I should see if I like his books. Then, on a night my kid and I were buying crappy headphones and so-so office supplies, lo and behold there was a Rick Hanson book. Dollar store books are one of the silly joys of this household. You can actually find ones that aren’t about fighting cancer with Jesus, though of course there are those, too. I flipped the book over and saw where it had been shelved in a previous life because once, it had lived out its days not in the humiliation (and reach) of a dollar store, but in the regular old arms of a proper bookshop.

And where had that proper bookshop shelved publications about successfully combining hearts and minds? In the diet section, obvs.

Oh, America, you are hilarious, solving your mental health challenges by switching from sugar to aspartame. Never change! (Actually, please change.)

Okay, friends. Before we head out, I need to tell you that my youngest recently referred to a former president in the middle of a story as: You know, that guy who got arrested? How’s your own legacy doing these days?

And my daughter stated of Jack Johnson: He’s kind of like Bob Ross but, like, a singer. Anyone else ready to rack up bylines as a culture critic? I’d read that column, don’t know about you.

I am sending you, from the middle of North America: crunchy leaves, cinnamon tea, and all the sticky notes your little heart can handle.

XOXO

Kara

from my kitchen table to yours

1. Update: I vacuumed the car and “detailed” the interior (hot water and rag with a little bit of dish soap) and man, do I recommend such a thing for your confidence as a human being. Maybe it’s because my grandfather ran a service station and my dad taught me “how to wash a car” by hand in my teens (I also recall using a jack in the driveway and learning how to change a tire by myself, skills I thankfully haven’t had to use and which may have sadly atrophied at this point). Was I thinking about all this as I scrubbed Great Lakes grime off our door frames and vacuumed up years of goldfish crackers? Yes! I didn’t suck up any crayons or french fries this time, which made me feel like maybe we should celebrate. Are we out of the “traveling atop melted crayons” phase of our lives? Time will tell.

2. Someone who knew me quite well once lovingly said I was “the least normal” person they knew. They meant it as a compliment and I took it as one. Even though for most of my adult years all I ever wanted was to be normal, now I think: it’s okay, I like whatever this is <3