Ash Wednesday Planting

Posted on February 23, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

I’ve held on through this incredibly mild February and resisted the urge to plant any seeds until today, February 22. The guy at Woods Garden and Nursery said it was ok. He sold me some seeds and a whole bunch of those expanding pellets for starting seeds. Also, I like the whole concept of planting with the liturgical calendar.

Around here, the common Catholic wisdom is that the seed potatoes go in the ground on Good Friday. Or maybe “by” Good Friday those years when Easter is late. The thing about Good Friday is that it is almost always a time when the ground is no longer frozen, and it is never before the last frost date, which up here is May 15.

I don’t know of any Ash Wednesday planting traditions, but it was a great day to bring the scent of peat and soil into the house and lay out the trays of seedlings. I planted peppers, cherry tomatoes, huckleberry bushes and leeks. One thing I know is that it’s never too early to plant leeks. They take 120 days to grow to maturity, perhaps longer, and they can sit in the ground awhile when they’re done growing, too. It will be a long time before I see the plants, which look like single blades of grass.

I figure the huckleberry bushes have to grow to 3-4 foot tall bushes before they’ll bear the berries, so it can’t be too soon to get them started. Last year, what I learned about peppers is that they  need warmth as well as light to get started, so I tucked the heating pad under their tray.

It probably is too early for the cherry tomatoes, but I have a new secret weapon that will allow me to put out my tomato plants maybe even in late April, but certainly in early May. Last year I left a note to myself in all caps next to tomatoes: DO NOT PUT OUTSIDE UNTIL JUNE 10! I end up planting and replanting because of the winds that come in just as it’s finally warm enough for the tomatoes to make it through the night. But this year– secret weapon. I’ll let you in on it when it’s time to move the tomatoes outside.

I also planted a little garden box with some radishes, mizuna (an Asian green) and lettuce. Maybe I’ll get some microgreens or something that can count as the earliest plant that I can eat just when the other seeds are going in the ground– which in a month I hope will be “just able to be worked.” Meanwhile, I now have the task of watering and watching, which is certainly a good practice for Lent.

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Poetry and Tea at the Fishhouse

Posted on February 21, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com
MaryJude at the fishhouse

Brother Paul Jasmer has had a fishhouse on Lake Sagatagan at Saint John’s Abbey and University since the mid-1980s. This is the second one, light enough to get on and off the lake and heavy enough not to blow around at night.

There’s never been a fish caught in this fishhouse. In fact, there’s no hole in the floor for putting an auger through and making a hole in the ice. As Brother Paul says, he’s a bit of a snob, and having caught fish at Lake of the Woods in Northern Minnesota, he wouldn’t waste his time on the Sag.

This fishhouse is where Brother Paul invites people to come and read poetry and drink tea. He invited the Queen of England, and a member of her staff wrote a lovely reply with the queen’s regrets. Garrison Keillor was supposed to come, but he didn’t make it in the end. But poets have made it out, and lovers of poetry who bring poems to read.

Brother Paul lays out an elaborate tea. The leaves are packaged especially for him by Upton Tea (he says he’s snobby about the tea as well). He boils the water on a small woodstove and warms the pot, then boils the water again and times the steeping with a pocket watch that, he tells us, is not gold, but was a gift from his parents.

Brother Paul Jasmer

There are candles in holders on small plates. There are china cups and saucers and Delft plates for the food. There are toothpicks for harpooning orange slices, and nuts and cookies. There is milk and sugar, or you can drink your tea continental style.

My friend Maryjude went with me and she brought along three marvelous poems she wrote. I read two of my recent short fiction pieces. Brother Paul had brought along a small icon of the three angels from Genesis. He hung it up as part of the unpacking of the tea supplies. He read a poem by D.H. Lawrence about this Biblical story. It also involved ice and wind and a knocking, and when he read it, there was ice and wind against the walls and he knocked on the wall at the appropriate time.

Tea for Three

He also read two poems by Phebe Hanson about being Lutheran in Sacred Heart, Minnesota, a town we drove through last summer on our way to Sleepy Eye.  The book was called Sacred Hearts.

It’s been a mild winter, but there was a sudden little flurry of a storm this afternoon. It was warm inside the fishhouse, though, and we feasted on cookies and poetry.

Posted in Benedictine monastery, poetry, religion, St. Joseph, writing | 6 Comments

Everything is a Story

Posted on February 14, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

I googled Jonathan Harris tonight, looking for more information on the founder of http://cowbird.com. What I knew about him from reading his stories on cowbird was that he has quite a following, is prolific in terms of photography and storytelling (557 stories on cowbird alone!), travels a lot and spends time in many different settings.  He knows people all over the world and has somehow brought them together on his site. He describes himself as an “artist, brother, computer scientist, nomad, seeker, storyteller.” Oh, and he seems very young and is very good looking.

It turns out, there’s a video lecture by him on TED.  As I watched it, I was able to fill in more. He’s a conceptual artist, using technology, specifically the internet and programs he writes, to visualize communication on the internet. The several projects he talks about in the lecture explore emotion and the internet. In one project, he develops a program to search and identify sentences posted in blogs that include the words “I feel” or “I am feeling,” grab the sentence containing these words and an image if available, and repost the information on another site, “We Feel Fine.” The site then organizes and displays the data in many ways, including assigning temperatures and colors to the feelings and representing them visually by warm or cool, happy or sad.

It’s impressive in terms of technology and it does make one think. Can we get a picture of the feelings of the world as posted on the internet? Why are all these people publishing their feelings? Is every sentence that includes “I feel” really expressing a feeling? Can the computer really caputre these feelings? Can art of this kind make us feel or convey feeling? What is the relationship between image and word and… feeling?

One thing that resonates with me is the way he considers narrative and image. This is something that I’ve been engaged with as I’ve written and posted to cowbird.com. The posts require and image to be complete. I have a lot of images, but I also find myself wondering if images I’m using are “safe” to use. Do they belong to other people’s stories? Even the archival images– when I attach them to a story, does it affect the people portayed there, the original context?

I have long been interested, also, in visual storytelling. I always think of coming across a bunch of my father’s scorebooks from our girls’ softball days in Park Forest and realizing that they were incredibly detailed visual stories. My father, a statistician to the core, has devised his own complicated systems for coding games, including football and basketball. These softball score books used a fairly standard system, and I sat down and read them. I often thought they would have made for an interesting piece in an exhibit on visual narrative and wish I had gotten a hold of them before they were thrown away.

It was in that spirit, under the spell of Jonathan Harris’s conceptual explorations, that I wrote this story for cowbird:  “My Father’s Book of Stories.”

What visual stories do you know?

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Is the Dalai Lama a Sellout or Just Really Enlightened?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

One of the documentaries we watched this week was The Sun Behind the Clouds. It chronicles the protests of China’s occupation of Tibet that broke out in 2008 (most noticed here in disruption of the travel of the torch around the world for the Beijing Olympics). It also pays particular attention to the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, Northern India, with extensive interviews with the Dalai Lama.

What comes through is the conflict between those who want to use non-violent resistance to liberate Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s long-held position of “the middle way,” which calls for “autonomy” but not independence for Tibet. In other words, the Dalai Lama has accepted living under Chinese rule, but wants the exiles to be able to return and the culture to be preserved and lived out in Tibet.

During the course of the movie, a group of the non-violent resisters embark on a march to Tibet, more than 2,000 miles across India. This follows some of the most serious protests in Tibet since China occupied it in 1951. The protests in Lhasa, Tibet, show monks on the street being harmed, crying out, taking their case to the media cameras. It reminds me of George Orwell’s story, “Shooting an Elephant,” which I used to teach regularly and in which the local monks spat at the British officials. When the monks hate you, I say, you’re on the wrong side.

And also, when the monks take to the street against you, your days are probably numbered. So it was for the British Empire (yes, I know it was more complicated than that) and also seems to have been for the recent oppressors in Burma.

China crushed the 2008 protests, and things seem to have very much settled down. So we’re left wondering what could have made a difference? I have to say, it drew clear attention to my own worldview that I felt, watching the film, the Dalai Lama could have made a huge difference.

A major tenet of my education has been the power of non-violent resistance, especially when led by a charismatic person of high moral character. Ghandi. Martin Luther King, Jr. There is nothing you can’t do– including bringing down an empire. The Chinese can’t kill the Dalai Lama. They would be in trouble if they arrested him. Nothing would mobilize people more than the Dalai Lama leading a group of non-violent resisters into Tibet. Right?

I suppose they could run tanks right over him and his followers, but it seems unlikely. This action, undertaken with the presence and support of the Dalai Lama, would mobilize millions across the world. And it is a recognized formula: bring attention to the oppression and suffering and mobilize people for change. It’s the founding principle of the Arab Spring. It’s Occupy Wall Street, but with a really clear agenda and a really great leader.

But the Dalai Lama won’t do it. And I’m not being sarcastic when I recognize he won’t do it because he is enlightened. He is post-nationalist in this way. He advocates preserving culture while abdicating self-rule. It is not compromise when he says it so much as transcending the ordinary categories. It is spoken like someone who has lived in community in exile for 60 years.

In May 2011, the Dalai Lama, through complex parliamentary procedures, separated his spiritual role from his political role, and retired as political leader of Tibet’s government in exile. It was, as much as anything, an attempt to protect the spiritual role from the grips of China. China’s government has said it will have to approve any future Dalai Lama after this one dies. If it is not a political role, their claim has much less validity.

Meanwhile, he continues to advocate a “middle way,” although China rejects this position and sees it as a pretense to hide the real aim of political independence. To which I say, “You calling the Dalai Lama a liar?” If so, you are on the wrong side.

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Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook

Posted on February 5, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

This gallery contains 1 photo.

I became a member of Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) last year in large part to get the Yearbook. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it to arrive, and it came last week. I am not disappointed. The thing is a regular phone book, … Continue reading →

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Hope

Posted on February 2, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com
I published this on cowbird.com, but you can only post one photo with a story there, and I had several chronicling this event. Thanks to free online slideshow tools, I made this little video to accompany the story. Read the story first, then click on the image for a brief video.

Hope

When my husband left, I set up shop at the dining room table. It looked out over the whole apartment and out to the balcony. This was my domain.

He was a vegetarian who ate fish. I let all the fish in the freezer turn into a single block of ice. I ate red meat and spinach, and not much else.

There was a neglected plant hanging on the balcony and the day after he left a pigeon nested there.

One day I locked my car in the garage and couldn’t get it out.

I smashed some expensive pottery he gave me in the alley.

Then one day I looked up and realized it wasn’t a pigeon nesting on my balcony. It was a dove.

Click on image to launch slideshow.

 

It is not just any dove. It is a mourning dove, which adds another dimension to the “hope” concept. This is an old story, newly told. It happened in March 2003. I can’t tell you how much that dove helped me.

 

Here’s one more photo from those days, with Bennie the cat. I don’t think he ever realized that there was a bird right above his head.

 
 
 
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At the Movies

Posted on February 2, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Our local theater pre-pizza parlor

First, let me give you a rant warning. Or a crank warning. This post is not about movies so much as the further degradation of the movie viewing experience in my town.

We are lucky here in St. Joseph to have an 18-screen multiplex nearby. That is enough screens that the theater can spare one for occasional art and foreign films. You have to watch closely to catch them as they pass through, and not all of them do, but now and then a quality film comes to town.

January is our favorite time to go to the movies. It’s cold outside and the Oscar nominations have been announced, so a bunch of “best film” options are making the rounds. Last Saturday I checked out Rotten Tomatoes,which told me that The Iron Lady was less risky than Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (which they described as “treacly,” a definite turn-off), so we decided to go see The Iron Lady. It was a fantastic movie about aging, really powerful and wonderful, not just a great performance by Meryl Streep (and Jim Broadbent) but wonderfully written and directed. I was a little disappointed when I saw it would focus on Margaret Thatcher’s last days, not her prime, but the flashbacks worked wonderfully, and the story fully kept my attention throughout. I think the critics at Rotten Tomatoes didn’t give it near enough credit.

It was especially amazing that it kept my attention because of all the freakin’ distractions in the environment. The local cineplex has recently invested more than $3 million in a renovation. There are lots of shiny screens in the lobby and the layout is more open. Supposedly seats with space-age memory foam are on their way. They’ve also added a pizza place, which I thought at first was a great idea. Just like the Angelika in SoHo, we could have dinner and a movie in one place! Looking at the menu and environment, I was much less impressed, but still wondered if it would be possible to order a pizza ready for take-out when the movie was over. We went to a 4:30 matinee.

What I had in no way anticipated was that my fellow theater-goers would bring sandwiches wrapped in very loud paper and whole pizzas into the theater! I have no problem with jamming a beer into the cupholder, but the whole theater was filled with the scent of pepperoni pizza, thanks to a young couple at the end of the first row. It was 5 p.m. Thank you.

The older couple at the end of our row took their sweet time eating those loud sandwiches and crumpling up the paper when they were done. Then the woman sang along every time that song from The King and I was in the movie.

Also, whoever is in charge of the actual movie didn’t turn the house lights all the way down. I hate that. I suppose it made it easier for the patrons to see their food, but I hope it was an oversight.

And it was freezing. Even with my down jacket draped over me, the back of my legs were penetrated by cold air. Next time I’m wearing long underwear and a hat.

Because, of course, there will be a next time. Much as I am disappointed, I can’t stay away from movie theaters. I had not thought it was possible to degrade the experience from the multiplex with its insanely loud sound and excruciating number of previews, but they found a way. No doubt when I’m old the experience will be worse still. Or I’ll be the one eating a sandwich and singing along.

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The Furniture Studio

Posted on January 27, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

The furniture studioOne of the things I love about Steve is his creative drive and vision. I also love that he just does things, though sometimes the scope of them scares me. I tend to fret and get overwhelmed easily by big projects. I have to remind myself to go “bird by bird,” as Anne Lamott advised. I have to take the small snapshot and move on from there.

Once the landscapinge season is over, Steve can turn to winter projects. This winter he’s transformed one of the old hog barns into a furniture-making shop. Impossibly quickly it has come together and he’s started transforming some of his early-morning sketches into wood and canvas and metal and, soon, leather.

When I leave for work in the morning, there’s a soft light coming through the garage door he had installed to bring light into the workshop.

In the evening, the soft light is still there, and smoke from the woodstove. The space is white and bright. He comes home smelling slightly of wood smoke but mostly of sawdust.

Some days he’s out there getting his “ass kicked” by the wood and joinery. But every day he is convinced that the chair is “a game changer” and something completely new.

In the way of rural winters on the farm, my sister-in-law Annie, whose house faces the studio, said she enjoys the company of that soft light during the day. Nice to know someone is out there creating something. At dinner time when it’s dark and the light goes out, she said she feels the satisfaction and slight deflation of another day done.

The prototype of the new sling chair came inside yesterday for testing in our living room. Last week at the Red Wing Shoe Company retail store in Red Wing, Minn., we found a lovely large piece of leather that will go on the next edition. First it has to pass the comfort and craft test.

Looking over my own winter, the writing has started going better, and I’ve had some real success with the short pieces. I’ve been posting more to cowbird.com, which you can view here or always on the poetry page of this site. I’m particularly happy with the recent story Tough Girls. It’s a story I’ve written before, but which works in this short form. The short, short stories are like my chairs– craft and inspiration I chisel out and join and hope, in the end, they’re comfortable.

furniture studio and chicken sun porch

furniture studio and chicken sun porch

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Higher Ground

Posted on January 21, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

ImageLast night I finally got to see Higher Ground, the film starring and directed by Vera Farmiga based on the memoir by Carolyn Briggs, This Dark World. It never came close enough for me to see it in the theater, so I waited for Netflix.

It’s hard for me to explain the effect this film had on me. I tried to make Steve stay awake through it, and he was bugging me by pointing out the obvious– the acting and cuts are awkward, the screenplay is not terribly strong. In short, something is “off” in the production and it’s not a great movie.

How could he think that mattered? When it was over, I said, “This is a very important movie for me. They got it right. That’s what I lived. That’s the culture I was in.” Again, he pointed out some annoyingly obvious things: but she was married, wore funny clothes, had children… what do you mean it was like your life?

The exchange reminded me of how I felt after reading Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an autobiographical novel by a woman that is about her fundamentalist upbringing in a working class British town and also a lesbian coming-of-age novel. Friends had recommended it to me for years as I told my own story about being in a Pentecostal, fundamentalist church from age 13, but I resisted reading it. It couldn’t possibly be about my life. When I read it, I was overwhelmed by how much resonated with me. I loved the book. I sent it to my brother with the note: “This book is about me, except I’m not a lesbian.” I felt the need to add that last phrase because, as an unmarried woman of 28, I think my family was half-expecting me to come out. My brother read it and sent me back a card: “Thanks, Susan. This book is exactly about me– except I’m not a British lesbian.”

So what is it? What is so important that I hope they get it right and it’s the only thing that matters?

Mostly, I think it’s the language. It’s hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced it how language can be so powerful, can so shape one’s being, how one thinks and behaves and relates to others. How bad a simple phrase can make you feel, how inadequate. How much you can want to get this particular way of loving God right. How spectacularly people can fail at it.

In Higher Ground, and in the memoir, it’s the relationship between Corrinne and her friend Annika that stands out the most to me. Annika is a creative, flamboyant woman who is nonetheless devout. She’s clearly been raised in a fundamentalist, Pentacostal church. She prays in tongues. She is sure in her faith, while maintaining her originality. She is happy in the faith. She draws and makes paintings of her husband’s penis. She easily jokes with Corinne. She is immature in ways, but she is easy in her skin and in the culture. I know people like that. They’re astonishing. They don’t struggle with where the “outside world” begins and the inner world of the Christian subculture begins. They live fully.

Steve has a Catholic critique of it. The world of the film made him crazy. “There’s no form! There’s no order! It’s just Scripture and personality. It’s a fantasy world. Thank God for the Church.” When you’re in a born-again Christian environment like the one I grew up in, it feels solid and complete. It feels like people know every answer. They seem right, even when it doesn’t feel quite right. Even when it’s hard (it’s supposed to be hard; it’s obedience).  But of course, Steve’s right. You’re at the mercy of personality and Scripture. Of course it often breaks down in destructive shows of ego and misdirected sexuality. The surprising thing, even while I was watching it, was how long the church community depicted in Briggs’ story stays together.

I understand that, too. It is part fantasy– you really want it to work. You really want to become the ones who seem to live it so easily. Who doesn’t want to depend on God and know the truth? But also, you love the other people. They are your family and friends, your primary relationships, your world. You want to be community with them. 

I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t lived it can really, fully understand what’s going on here. I think if they did, they would see a film like Jesus Camp in a different light. I hope with more sympathy, but maybe not. In some ways, I think the truest thing about my years in an Assembly of God Church in the South Suburbs of Chicago was the brokenness. There was so much brokenness in the people assembled there, and it was heartbreakingly beautiful to struggle with them in my own brokenness. I wrote in a poem that it came down to “the love, even done this poorly, what little we could do with what the world allowed: our battered hands and this God.”

That mattered. That moves me in this film.

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Our Food Anxiety

Posted on January 16, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

I just finished devouring The Hunger Games, a book that is obsessed with food. As I was reading, feeling both uneasy that this is children’s literature and completely impressed by the writing and the evocation of a post-apocalyptic world, I was also reminded of two other recent books I’ve read in the genre: Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road and Margaret Atwood’s much less successful The Year of the Flood. 

All three books are grounded in the basic post-apocalyptic trope of survival. The chief enemy in the books are other people. The key to survival is food. The worst thing that can happen is you are reduced to cannibalism (that road leads to zombiehood).

I’m not sure if this is new, exactly, but it seems to me that most previous movies of this kind had built-in food systems. There are always human predators, but there are usually also ample canned goods. Or it’s simply not addressed. The resource they’re fighting over is oil, or water, or (as with zombies and aliens) it’s a more primal battle to stay alive. 

The preoccupation with food in these books does seem to me to fit perfectly with our nation’s recent large-scale anxiety over how our food is grown, produced and packaged. Can it be an accident that these writers are putting forward that the way to survive that worst possible future that might be ahead (caused either by human violence, nuclear accident, epidemic or global climate change) is to know what plants are edible and what ones are medicinal, how to hunt and gather, preserve food and also barter and sell it?

The Road seems kind of old school in its approach to the problem of food procurement. The father and son are still mostly scavenging for canned goods. Their best stroke of fortune is when they come to an underground bunker filled with food. The film version made excellent use of product placement in the story, not just the Coke can which is in the book but also Spam, Cheetos, Bud Light and Smartwater (that one actually made me laugh when I saw it in the film– good thing they have those electrolytes for mental clarity!). The message is clear: we can live off the crappy excess of our agricultural-industrial complex for a long time.

Both of the other books, however, seem to revel in details of the meagre produce in the rooftop garden (YotF) or the glory of rabbit meat and mint leaves (HG). Hunger Games doesn’t seem to have a single scene that doesn’t revolve around food– either the lack of it, getting it or the quality of it. Every menu in the Capitol is chronicled in detail and we’re meant to marvel at the privileged folks’ lucky access to rich foods, sauces and desserts. The heroine is a hunter/gatherer of extraordinary skill and talent and the hero is a baker’s son.

I admit that my gardening definitely has some roots in an apocalyptic world view. I love the idea of being “off the grid” and the promise of having water and food and wood to burn in case of an emergency. I also know, of course, that I wouldn’t last a week! But it’s a nice sort of fantasy to think one is self-sufficient and providing food for one’s self. I believe more in McCarthy’s world, however, being able to depend on cans of chili and Cheetos, than in being able to live off the land.

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