In My Own Words

A long, long time ago, someone, somewhere, created a man named Santa Claus. If I’d done more research, I could give you a better origin story for the current iteration, but you know who I mean. He’d existed before under various pseudonyms and with varying powers, but this go ‘round they made him old, gave him a red suit, a sleigh, and a herd of reindeer. They gave him a team of helpers, an address no one can find, and they eventually gave him a wife who makes cookies and helps him keep up with his schedule.

They also gave him a job. Every year he was to fill a sleigh with toys – enough to spread around the whole world – and hitch that sleigh to his reindeer and fly out into the night to deliver his packages. Delivery required coming down chimneys or other various means of breaking and entering, and depending on the family being visited, the gifts also had various levels of meaning and expense.

Every year he makes appearances on television, on radio, on stages and mall platforms to check in with children who promise they’ve earned their spot on the good list, while adults fall over themselves to make sure the meetings can happen. And as they pull one screaming, terrified child after another off the knee and past the elf with the tiny candy cane prizes, they smile and wink at each other for keeping up with the secret.

It’s that secret that I see as a miracle. Not just any small miracle either – this one is huge. For decades upon decades, people around the world have kept the secret of Santa. Even people like my little brother and his wife who were absolutely adamant they were not doing Santa at their house because they weren’t going to, and I’m quoting here, “Lie to their child” haven’t missed sitting my nephew on Santa’s knee for the past 8 years. Even during covid times my husband and I were with them when they trapsed through the snow downtown to a small hut where a man with a white beard and a red suit sat behind a plexiglass partition to listen patiently while my nephew outlined what he would like to see under the tree. And we all went along with his excitement afterward, agreeing with him that Santa liked him and would deliver.

It’s miraculous to me that as a people who globally disagree on so many important issues, who battle and belittle, and war with one another 364 days of the year, we keep up the secret of Santa. Each of us a willing participant in the “big lie” to avoid being the one to kill the magic of the fairy tale. Not one of us wanting to be the one who says “Sorry, Walter, there is no Santa Claus.”

A little something from a 2 minute excercise.

I can’t go on, I go on. What other choice do we have once we enter onto this Ferris Wheel called life? Round and round we go in the universe, collecting momentum to continue forward, bringing the other riders along with us as we spin to the carnival music never quite in time with the lights. It’s a crazy ride, for sure, and maybe it could use a few tweaks. Maybe some safety measures to protect the heart when the wheel spins to hard, but it spins as it always has and we stumble off at the close of it all with a haggard thank you, thank you for the ride.

I will not say another prayer for this world

I will not. I cannot.

No matter color, creed, or crown

I will not sit silent at your table

I will not kneel with my head bowed

I will not. I cannot.

They say their preacher can speak in tongues

I say I will not hold mine

I will not. I cannot.

They say a prayer will heal us all

I say the time to pray has passed us by

The time to do is now.

When the cries of the suffering are still ringing in our ears

When the scorched trees of our forests are still crumbling at our feet

When hatred’s poison flowers are still blooming in the concrete

I cannot stop to pray

I will not. I cannot.

When I take my seat at your table it will be a show of action

It will be a sign of strength

When I bow my head with you, I will not be alone

The hurt of a million mothers will lead my heart

The wisdom of ancient scholars will carry my mind

And the howl of a warrior will be on my lips

The sacred spaces of a homebody…It’s a difficult task to describe places that are sacred to me, the person who jokes about home being the only sacred space. The girl who didn’t travel well as a kid, and preferred nights alone in her own room to sleepovers with friends, regretting it every time I accepted an invite. My childhood home hasn’t been home since I was fourteen and the house we moved to after that had nothing sacred to it. I still have no connection to that dwelling where my parents live. It’s just a house.

I’m happy in my forest house now, but still struggle to describe it as feeling sacred. I haven’t quite figured out how to make it mine yet, this space in the Puget Sound, though parts of it feel right. Parts of it feel real. When I’m here, I know I’m in the place that will be home for a long time to come. Other times, I sit on my deck and stare out at the trees, the grand stretch of the Olympic Mountains and mist from the Hood Canal behind us, and think it’s still just an almost.

In thinking about this class, I thought about one place I traveled to. The vacation, as we simply called it, where I finally felt like I’d come home. Our first anniversary trip to Ireland, and specifically Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. We wandered through so many sacred places on our car ride from Dublin on the east coast to Shannon on the west, but Christ Church was the first to make me cry.

It wasn’t the holy-ness of the building, or the milling about of real-time worshipers that caught tears in my throat. It was the longevity of the building. It was the history in the stones and the pews and the tombs below that hit my heart. For hundreds of years longer than the country I’d been born in had existed as a country, this church had sat in the middle of a small but growing city, cared for and protected. Built up and torn down, rebuilt and redesigned with countless stories folded into every stone.

We wandered past the heart-shaped box (not yet stolen) and an ancient copy of the Magna Carta, into the basement there, reading names of those entombed, marveling at the gold artifacts that had been stolen and then stolen back. Candle sticks that once resided in a grave to protect them, and a cat who chased a mouse into an organ where both were mummified, all while a modern-day DVD outlining nearly 1,000 years of history played in the corner. The sight of it all together, the TV on the old-school rolling stand pushed into the stone corner along tombs of the long dead, and belonging there, nonetheless, was humbling.

Outside of the main doors was one of the original foundations that had been laid in this spot almost 1,000 years before as a Viking church. Of course, it was a Viking church that spoke to me. The Celtic and Norse stories always being the strongest in my heart. Silkenbeard – as the Viking King of Dublin was known because the Vikings loved their nicknames as much as their facial hair – could not have known then that I would come to stand silently weeping at his sacred foundation. My own newness and the newness of my roots exposed against his ancient, crumbling steps.

You did not need to be a Viking, or a Dubliner, or religious to feel the power of the grounds under your feet. You didn’t even need to step inside the doors of the church to feel the sanctity of the small, rectangular ruin. The sacredness is evident in the care and protection by lay people, continuing for centuries after a Viking King’s death, in the foreign city I felt was home. My sacred home came to me, the homebody who didn’t travel, in the cobbled streets and rolling hills of an island I spent too little time on and have spent countless hours trying to recreate.

Imagine being four years old. Your parents are unstable both financially and mentally, making your homelife chaotic, and your mother is pregnant again. You suffer housing insecurity and food insecurity in your small religiously conservative town of about 600 people where you encounter more judgment than compassion. The three of you are outcasts, judged for your poorness, and both your parents are forced to beg for work, food, and places to stay. The older children scorn you and tease you and make you a target for their own attention-seeking entertainment. You know nothing beyond the hunger and cold caused by your parents’ fates, but it’s about to get much worse for you.

On March first your mother is jailed for being a witch. On March twenty-fourth you are imprisoned with her for the same crime. They interrogate you about your mother relentlessly, using your forced testimony to justify sentencing her to die once her next baby is born. You are with your mother in jail when your baby sister is born. You are with her in jail when your baby sister dies. On July 19^th you are left behind in your child-sized shackles when adults – supposedly intelligent, educated, well-regarded adults – lead your mother and others to the gallows.

You were never indicted but your father struggled to collect the $50 fee owed for the expense of your imprisonment, and you could not leave until he paid. Your birthday comes and goes, and at the age of five you are finally released from jail on December tenth, nine months after being arrested. You were released but your life is never recovered, and you are driven insane by the events of your childhood. You die at the young age of sixteen, still in the same small town where your childhood was destroyed, never able to escape any of the nightmare you suffered through.

200 people, over 30% of your community, were charged as witches during your incarceration. They were targeted with zero evidence, only hysterical performances by children encouraged by selfish adults. At least five people died from the conditions in the jail you were housed in. Nineteen of the accused, including your mother, were hanged. An eighty-one-year-old man was crushed to death under heavy stones for refusing to confess to being in league with the devil.

There was never true evidence of occult practices in Salem. Most of the accused were devoutly religious people, in line with the rest of their community. Out of an abundance of coincidence, the accused were involved in political or family disputes or were part of the fringe outcasts of society. The world knows about the Hatfields and McCoys, but the bitter dispute between the Putnums and the Porters was disguised as a holy war against the devil himself with the help of a Reverend, and their enemies paid the price. Some of the accused owed money to the accusers, some owned desirable land that couldn’t be pried away if they were living. Only after the governor’s wife was called a witch, did they decide it had gone too far and the trials and the hangings stopped in Salem.

Once the frenzy died down, the accusers went on to claim it was they themselves who had been taken over by the devil. It was easier to say “The devil made me do it” than it was to admit the witch hunt they’d participated in was a farse they could have prevented. Not one of them faced a trial of their own despite the number of deaths they caused. The town eventually issued an apology and made a poor attempt at pardons and reparations. Your father was paid $30 eighteen years after his wife’s murder, $20 less than he paid to get his daughter out of jail.

Now imagine, over three hundred years later, your life and deaths of the accused in Salem are nothing more than a lure to various tourist traps. The list of things to do in Salem is dotted with “witch tours”, and kitschy slogans cover everything from home decor to t-shirts. The accused remain stand-ins for occultism they never followed, and actual Pagan practitioners have their beliefs tied to times of religious persecution and mocked as a source of dark entertainment.

We still refer to the events as the “witch trials” instead of what they really were, a true witch hunt. A search for imaginary criminals guilty of imaginary crimes spurred on by greed and hate. Even the term “witch hunt” has lost its importance, and people throw it around in modern day without acknowledging the devastating origins. The witch hunts happened as part of a larger cultural shift to further silence women and it was successful in many ways. For 300 years around the globe the crime of being a witch was used against those who were different or in the way. Estimates range from as high as nine million people murdered down to 40,000, due to bad recordkeeping, but everyone agrees roughly 80 percent of the accused and murdered were women and girls.

There is an element of the imaginary when people talk about the witch hunts. We make jokes and cutesy signs linking witches to Salem, and linking Salem to fall festivities even though the events themselves did not occur near Halloween. Like so many other points in history where the truth is ugly, we sweep aside reality to make it palatable that real people were murdered in the guise of lawful execution, and they were murdered because they were different. In the early years of the witch hunts all it took was three neighbors to agree that the accused was a witch to convince those in charge. Three contrary neighbors could cost you your life.

While Salem was not the first nor the last time people used religion, mental health, or financial status to rid themselves of those they didn’t like, it is one we continue to make light of. The fictionalized account of witchcraft is overwhelming when it comes to Salem, erasing the reality of who the victims were and what was done to them and their families. To think about a town running out a few warty-nosed crones is much easier to profit from than the fact that a town had child-sized shackles made to imprison a toddler. So, next time you see a t-shirt for the “Salem Broom Company”, or a little witch knocks on your door for a treat, take a moment to remember little Dorothy Good, and the thousands of others who were murdered by people disguising themselves as the devil.   

I’ve started another writing course and I think this 2 minute write may eventually evolve into something more…

This is what happened. Just give me a second to catch my breath and then I’ll tell you the whole story. The whole story of me and my life and how I got to this place in the woods, where you caught me dancing with the moon. I’ll tell you about the journey, the rocks in the road, the thorns in my sides, the broken glass that took over my voice, and the very moment I thought I would be no more. But the end was my beginning. I was falling and falling for so long, waiting for the proverbial bottom to appear, or a time keeping rabbit to stop by, but the fall continued until one day I screamed for it to stop. I screamed and screamed and fell no more.

I don’t know if I ever was an earth girl. Of course, I’m an earthling, born and raised here, but the earth itself was never my favorite place. There’s a lot to be wary of, here on the blue planet. Growing up, my favorite place was my closet. The old-school closets the home builders of the 70’s constructed, long and shallow, with sliding doors. One side held my clothes, the other side held me. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a shy kid. Ever. I’m the first book I ever tried to write, sharing page after page over my 47 years here with only a few footnotes still kept to myself. They’ll likely come out at the end though.

Earth has always been a tricky place for me. Beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Lush and liquid here, baren and broken there. Careful where you step, careful what you touch. Everything is tricky when you have hay fever. Allergic to everything called a grass or a bloom. The linden trees my dad loves, the marigolds meant to keep away the mosquitoes, it all brought out my love of winter, when it’s easier for me to love the earth. When the tricky things all die. Well, the tricky plant things. People are still here in the winter.

Of course, I don’t mean it. I didn’t want the stuff to die. I don’t want the earth to die. It was the easy way out, the excuse not to look at what was happening. I grew up in an ancient lake bed, dried up and carved up, the mountains around me like walls. Inside my mountain valley it was easy to think we were loving the earth. The green lawns and mountain escapades. Climbing the red rocks to the arches. Look at how much we love her, our mother earth, don’t you see it in our pictures? We didn’t know. We really didn’t know.

A little self love experiment from class tonight.

Damn girl, Look what you’ve done. Pregnant at nineteen, single mom at twenty, now you’re a wannabe fairy living your dream life in the forest, just missing her wings. Yet, you haven’t let go of the guilt and you gotta do it. That shit is getting heavy and it’s time to put it down. No one is mad at you. He’s not mad at you. You did everything you needed to do for him. Some of it was right and some of it was wrong, but that’s life, you know? Nobody’s perfect but look at him! He’s told the world himself he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for his Mum. Allow yourself that one.

For real, girl, look at what you’ve done. You dipped your toe in the emergency services world at twenty-one, almost your dream job. The closest you thought you could reach it with the single mom thing you took on first. Through phonelines you delivered babies, you instructed breaths, you helped people, you directed officers, you cared. Maybe you could have cared for yourself a little more? Maybe you could have helped yourself a little bit more. But you did it until you couldn’t, and when you had to pivot, girl did you pivot.

Wooee, it was a twisty pivot. Twenty-five and laid off with a five-year-old, sure, you’ll work for a Stevedore. As soon as someone tells you what a Stevedore is. You figured it out and it didn’t take you long at all, though after you got a hold of it they didnt want you to succeed. Specifically, HE didn’t want you to succeed, but for thirteen years, you did. You fought your way through it all every week, work impeccable but personality flawed. He thought you could have laughed at his jokes a little more. He thought you could bow down a little more. He thought you could have been a little more timid, but that’s never been you.

Insecure, yes. Self-doubting? Of course. But, timid? No. A girl who bows down? Not a chance. You’re 5’2″, how much lower to the ground did they expect you to go? You left when you were ready and he even ruined that, taking away the goodbyes you deserved to give, but it was time. Not because you hated it, but because you hated having to defend YOU on the daily, and good for you for that. Fucking good for you.

You might cuss a bit too much. It’s not ladylike, you know? I know, I know, you’re not a lady, but you’re afraid of water, so a sailor’s mouth you shouldn’t have. But you know words, I’ll give you that. You know their power, you know their purpose, and you know how to use them. But you probably don’t need to swear so fucking much. Maybe you get a pass on this one. We can see that when you fucking decide to use the fucking swear words you make sure they go in the right fucking order. And you’re at least proper enough to cut back around small children and the elderly. Well, some small children and some elderly, but still, fucking good enough.

So, what do you do next, girl? Start believing in you. Start believing them when they tell you you can write. You wrote the book, you landed the agent, so trust her. Trust her and move on to the next one. You’re 40% there already and you know where you’re going because they’re telling you where to go, the ones in you’re head in their world you created. People love to hear about those pretend people you put on the page, so finish it already and remember who the fuck you are.

I started taking some writing courses recently. It was a bit intimidating at first. I haven’t taken a writing class since high school but these classes with Laura Lentz have helped me hold on to my vulnerable side while writing about the emotional things I’m trying to hammer into a novel. Durring the class we do one-minute writes and 13-minute writes, and some of the one-minute bursts have been some of my favorites. I’m going to share a few here to hold on to them. The final poem, Glass Warrior, was a 13 minute write.

Time…

We are all pinned against time. It moves through us, around us, and eventually without us, continually ticking after our own hearts stop. How reckless can one afford to be with so little time to hold onto?

Our Voices…

We bless each other with our voices, speaking, singing, shouting, words of praise, of power, of protection. We bless each other with our words of truth. Don’t whisper, though. Raise your voice. Let it ride on the echoes of the ones who came before and be the guide to the ones who will come after. We were warriors once, women of the world, stopped by a cold storm that left us silent. Do not let silence be the sound of the future. Rile it up with the warrior’s scream.

My Heart…

My heart, my heart, my heart

Can you help me find my heart? I was pretty sure it was here yesterday.

Or maybe that was last Tuesday?

Still, I was pretty sure it was all here

Still whole

Still mine

Today it seems to be missing

The beat silently ungiving

So, can you help me find it?

My heart, my heart, my heart

What is My Heart

My heart is glass, fractured but not shattered. My heart is the warrior’s shield, knicked and battered. My heart is the dragonfly wing, iridescent and glowing. My heart is the part of me that believes it is all knowing.

Glass Warrior

She lives in a sacred cavern

Protected by its depth

Hidden by its secrecy

The rhythm of her, her only betrayer

Sounding out to those close by

Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom

To be hidden is crucial

It’s a must if she wants to survive

Glass things shatter if hit hard enough

Her fractures are deep

Her structure barely holding

She welded her shield in front of her

She lashed her sword to her side

She is a fearsome Warrior

Even if her mighty spirit she must hide

To give in to self-destruction, is not of her mind

You see,

Glass things shatter if hit hard enough

(And she’s come oh so very close to hard enough)

This Glass Warrior now must hide

A little course work on ancestors…

They remind us they love us in their own peculiar ways. Janice with her flower talk, Ilene with her frosting. Giving bits of themselves in place of the stories that are too hard to tell. The stories of their beginnings, their hardships, their truths. For if they don’t share the hurt, they believe they’re only planting happiness. They do not realize the void left behind by their secrets. A void that would be happily filled with truths.

We pause and remember the early years. The years of our youth when history didn’t matter to us. Our concerns then were of homework and test scores, and who could play night games on a Thursday night. How our line of humans came to be didn’t cross our minds then. It is only now, as we age to point of self-reflection that we think back on all of the stories we never thought to ask.

I like to think that somewhere inside of me, the women who came before me stand tall. I like to think they would look at where I’ve taken myself and be happy for that. I like to think they would read my words and admire the way I use my voice and tell my stories. Maybe they’d even get a kick out of some of the not so perfect parts, like my grandma Buster did, giggling when my cousin Hayley and I said ‘fuck’ in family conversations. I like to think they would look at me – the latest in these lines traversing like the brass inlay on a fancy globe – and be proud of where they ended up in life. With me.

I didn’t get to know them all well enough, and I think on that now as an adult. I know Janice changed her middle initial to M so she didn’t have to completely give up her maiden name. A name that wasn’t even correct, changed by her ancestors after coming from Sweden. I know she loved her garden. I know she loved cooking a meal and having her family share her table. I know she loved reading a good mystery, and that she loved wearing glasses. She thought they gave way to the fact that she was smart.

I wish I knew what she wanted when she was girl. I wish I’d thought to ask more questions when she talked about starting school to be a nurse, deciding quickly it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Did she know what she wanted to do? Was it something that would have been allowed at the time? I think not. See, I think of her as being a little more feisty in her youth than she was at a grandmother in my years. She was funny and vibrant, and I think she would have embraced that more if she was part of a different generation. But I don’t know because I didn’t think to ask.

I think about my grandma Bear, and she is another mystery in my timeline, never to be solved. I know a lot about Ilene. I spent oodles of time with her during my childhood. So many hours of just the two of us, crafting or cooking, making cakes. I know her pinky was crooked because she cut her little finger off in the stand mixer. I know because I was there. It was a favorite story to tell in elementary school after the trauma. I know about her ailments and illnesses. I know she loved to listen to a man with a guitar, as we all did, reminiscent of nights at her parents tiny house, listening to her dad sing his songs while the smoke swirled in waves along the ceiling.

I know she loved my grandpa enough to marry him 3 times, and I know she was difficult enough for him to divorce her 4. I don’t know what she wanted for herself though. Married and a mother before she was eighteen, is that all she saw for herself? The daughter of a fix it man, mink rancher, gold miner, bar singer, and his wife Thelma. Did her own mother’s lot of just a mother and a wife influence her, or did she dream of more? Would she have opened a bakery? Would she have traveled the world? I wish I’d thought to ask what the real her had wanted for herself.