I do not have an accounting of the building of the church, but this story has been apart of the Riehl heritage all of my lifetime.

My maternal Grandfather E. A. Riehl was not a church going man. Do not confuse this as saying that he was not a religious man.

1) He believed in a Divine Presence, and communed with his God through the love and prorogation of God’s plants and fruits.

2) He also ministers to human problems.

— He “figured out” the ingredients of a salve that he gave freely to the neighbors who had need of ointment and they had no money for doctor’s ministration.

—He made coffins in his shop for those who could not afford the “store-bought” ones.

The only reference I found in his day books was that he had gone to a church meeting and had not been inspired by the sermon. This, the background. His opinions and thoughts on this subject were well known.

Yet, he was actively helping to build the Melville Congregational Church.

One day, and one of the other neighbor volunteers asked him:”Mister Riehl, why are you helping build this church? It is well known that you are not a church going man.”

His reply went something like this: “I commune with my God through my work with God’s creations like the plants and flowers. But a community needs a church for the people who need the formality of worshiping together, and the other things like funerals and weddings. I believe that a community needs a church. I am helping to build it.”

Remember that in that day there were no funeral parlors to take care of funeral services. Weddings were performed in a church, or in the parsonage.

The phrase “Outer, Inner, Secret, and Innermost Secret” comes from a practice sequence in Tibeten Buddhism.

OUTER

In the design of space in my apartment, the Outer room in the front room…what most folks would call the “living room.” But, for me, it is my Goddess Gathering Room.” This is where I recieve guests, entertain, commune. It is my public salon.

INNER

The Inner room is my bedroom…very simple. Just a bed from my fathers house and a basket collection from Botswana.

SECRET

The Secret room is the back room. This is my study, my workroom, my den…my screen room…where I work on the computer and watch TV. This room would conventionally have been the master bedroom.

INNERMOST SECRET

The Innermost Secret room is a walk-in closet I’ve converted to my meditation/shrine room.

What are the Outer, Inner, Secret, and Innermost Secret areas of your life as reflected in your living space?

THE UPPER CRUST

An explanation of the title might be helpful. I was raised by three maiden aunts and my maternal grandfather. They had their own way of expressing things, which was always quite picturesque and also quite accurate!

When they were speaking of people who were a part of the top of the social scale they often referred to them as being a part of “the upper crust.” I never questioned the origin of this expression at that time, but in later years I think it referred to a pie that was covered by a layer of crust on top of the peach, apple, rhubarb, or whatever kind of fruit was being used. This upper crust was a luxury. When someone acted as if they thought they were at the top of the social scale and really were not, my aunts said that they were “the underdone bottom of the uppercrust.”

To properly understand this expression one needs to remember that in rural America in the nineteen twenties and thirties baking was not the exact science that it is today with electric and gas ranges on which the oven temperature can be controlled by the turn of the control knob. The oven temperature in the country kitchen range was regulated by the amount of split wood or coal that the cook (who was almost always also the “fire person”) put into the fire box. The results thereof were governed by the skill of the cook. This was also sometimes further complicated by the wind, or a damp morning when the “draft” up the chimney would be affected considerably.

The upper crust of the pie was the last thing to get done, and sometimes it didn’t!

From witnessing my father at ceremonies surrounding death, I’ve learned a new approach to being at these events.

He is completely natural. He visits. He chats. He may even make a joke. He tells stories. These are transmissions of comfort through the transmission of culture.

I have never heard him utter any of the classic phrases of condolence. Yet, all the time, he is actively condoling, comforting, and providing companionship.

This is what is needed in times of loss: a human response from the heart, not a canned response from a book.

My father visits during a visitation with no false solemnity. As children we are comforted in our mother’s arms. As adults, we are held in the arms of community, extended in love.

May first. May Day is a many-splendored thing with more official holiday designations than perhaps any other day of the year. I recall as a child weaving May Day wreaths from spirea branches cut from our bushes and hanging them on our neighbors door. I especially liked hanging my wreath on Aunt Grace’s door in the brown cottage.

As a woman living in Northern California, I celebrated May Day by dancing around a Maypole with other women in a secluded spot on Point Reyes.

Since May 1, 2006, though, this day has taken on another, deeper meaning. May first for me now mainly means the time my mother chose to pass from this earth. What a perfect time she chose to be the Queen of May…to culminate her lifetime graduate studies as a biology major.

Mother’s high school graduation photo

For many people this May 11th will be Mothers Day. For my father and me, it’s today. Today is not only Mothers Day, it is my mother’s day. We won’t be weaving funeral wreaths as grieving Romans did to appease Pluto, master of the Underworld. No, we’ll be stepping out. Most likely we’ll take an outing to Calhoun County to enjoy a day together in a place where my father and mother loved exploring and birding together…and perhaps have a country feast at Widman’s Hotel. Wherever we go, and whatever we do…Mother remains our Queen of the May.

Asa way of connecting more fully with us, you can read some of my poems for Mother on the sidebar under “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” Just look for the section titled “Sweet Little Dove.” You’ll also find her life story there and a moving tribute my father spoke at her graveside service.

By taking this day stepping out together we honor mother’s memory and her place in our lives as she lives on in them, during the first two years following her change of destination. It is both our memorial to memory and our pilgrims’ cairn on the path to the continuing future my father and I now share.

As the beauteous Ibtisam Barakat (author of “Taste the Sky”—see post below as well) laid out a table filled with books overflowing with tabbed pages and Naomi Shihab Nye’s wisecracks began to flow alongside her wisdom, we knew we were in for something besides just another luncheon speech.

Ibtisam Barakat

Let’s back up. I knew it when I saw her greeting some folks from the conference as we stood in the buffet line. I knew it when my eyes couldn’t leave her compelling slender form during Walter Bargen’s (Missouri’s first Poet Laureate) heartfelt introduction. As he praised her, at moments she seemed embarrassed. Walter acknowledged they had a deal and that he’d strayed off-script and then went to his prepared remarks, which nearly brought her to tears as her hand flew to her heart, clearly honored by his appreciation of her work.

That’s the essence I felt from her during our time with her: appreciation, encouragement, hospitality, generosity…all the qualities of character and value that lend to a shared world of connection rather than barrier.

Whenever I encounter someone in person—even from the distance as a listening audience member or the brief engagement afterwards—and find this person as genuine and worthy of admiration as she has seemed before in her work on the page or on the Lannan Literary Video Series—then, that’s saying something. That’s reassuring to me, that our world is redeeming itself at every moment through our acts and words.

Naomi currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, but spends a good deal of her time on the road. She’d just come from a conference on Long Island in which ancestral connections and memory was key. Naomi told us about her father’s book: Does the Land Remember Me? (see post below for link)

“We all have so much more than we know,” she said, and took as her theme the importance of slow time and solitude in nurturing our writing lives...harkening back to a time when we were “interested in texts, but not texting all the time.” Did I mention she is funny and witty in a natural, unforced rhythm of her storytelling?

Naomi spoke movingly of her girlhood in St. Louis and her second grade teacher, Mrs. Lane who believed that poetry is our lifeline. Mrs. Lane set aside space on the blackboard for each student. This was, in a sense, their poetry locker for the week. They were to bring in a poem by someone else or write one of their own to fill the space. At the end of the week, before the board was cleared, each child picked the poem that had worked into their life that week…and, not the poem they’d brought themselves. At intervals, the class stitched handmade books (some of which Naomi still has) with poems by great poets on one page followed by second graders on the next. The Democracy of Poetry, shall we say?

Naomi said she felt that in our over-filled lives that writing helps us regain that calm we had in a slower world. She quoted William Stafford as saying, “In life, I don’t like too much to happen.”

Since Missouri is known as the Show Me State, Naomi mentioned that “Poetry tries to show us things.” She gave us these five guidelines:

1) Write a lot and often so our writing doesn’t feel too set apart and we don’t strive for perfection when we sit down to write. Regular, short sessions are good practice.

2) Praise and blame isn’t what counts.

3) Share your work. You are not alone.

4) Hoard good things to read.

Remember: April 17th is Poem in Your Pocket Day

5) Claim your time and solitude.

Like myself, Naomi finds the current buzzword BUSY offensive and has rejected it from her vocabulary—another lesson learned from her second-grade teacher Mrs. Lane.

She quoted the late John O’Donahue of Ireland on the subjects of home, belonging, and rest…and childhood as a forest of first feelings and events. “Writers are always revisiting” earlier territory, no matter how much we’ve previously written about these forests of feeling.

“There are so many voices for you to fall in love with,” Mrs. Lane told her students. Naomi is still falling in love. That is the basis of her lovlieness.

“We must regain and reclaim time for rumination,” Naomi urged us, and I loved being in her class, imagining myself back in second grade, at the foot of a nurturing teacher. Just to think of how Mrs. Lane shaped her young poet self!

“Think about what you need to write? Not for the glory or the glamor, but as a tool…as something useful for the people who will read it.”

In the question period, in considering how to bring that sense of slow time back to our children today, Naomi recalled that the Stafford family had NO CORD DAYS. Their own family had OLD-FASHIONED DAYS in which they did things as if it were, say, 100 years ago.

She also told us how she used to wake up her son with several poems in the morning, sifting these into his consciousness, up until the age of 19. He’s now earned a scholarship based on his writing, and that’s not his major.

In closing, Naomi read us a prose piece titled “Gate A-4″ in which a dicey situation was turned around at an airport gate when she was able to speak with an older Palestinian woman who thought the plane was cancelled rather than delayed…and by dint of her creative intervention, a shared world of cookies and care emerged. “This is the world I want to live in,” the piece concludes. “Not everything is lost.”

No indeed. This is the world I want to live in as well—this shared world of connection spun around us like an enveloping soft shawl today.

Naomi Shihab Nye didn’t just give us a talk at lunch today. She gave us herself. She gave us a shared world.

The SANKOFET is a poetry form created by the Sisters-Nineties Literary Group. The format has three verses or stanzas of seven lines each. The first verse represents the past; the second verse is the present; and the third verse represents the future. The last word at the end of each stanza is the first word of the next stanza and the last word of the poem is also the first word in the poem. The fourth line in all three verses is a refrain echoing the call and response motif. The Sankofet correlates with the meaning of the mythical Sankofa, a bird which represnts the theme of “go back and get it.” Go back to the past and retrieve one’s history in order to build a future. The last word of each stanza is the same beginning word in the following stanza, which is symbolic of the Afrikan concept of the cycle of life. (slightly adapted from the Sisters-Nineties Literary Group Handbook of Poetic Forms.)

Linda Jo Smith and I met at The Space when she read for a Women’s History poetry event. I loved her strong presence and bought her chapbook “Involuntary Traveler: Poetry and Prose.” You can reach Linda Jo Smith at theljaysmith2@yahoo.com.

“Jazz Marsalis” is a fine example of this innovative form. I particularly enjoy its ability to connect music and words and food…combining so many senses and art forms. —JGR
________________________________________________

JAZZ MARSALIS
a Sankofet by Linda Jo Smith

from “Involuntary Traveler”
copyright 2008 by Linda Jo Smith

for lent I gave up the idiot box
and my insane snacking temptation
causing hindrance to the metaphoric
creations my soul’s entity requires
a breakthrough; classical inspiration
the stategy—create a rhythmic balance
instead of eating, so I think I’ll break
me off a piece of that jazz marsalis!

marsalis; first family of American
classical music headed by daddy, Ellis
keys of ivory seasoned with ebony striking
creations my soul’s entity requires
punctuated with Delfeayo’s trombone
melody stimulating my brain cells
like a Grace Bumbry aria.

aria speaks from Wynton’s trumpet
shouting out the color of Katrina’s tragedy
jason licking the cymbals of hurricane violence
creations my soul’s entity requires
my computer keyboard, a metaphoric vessel,
Branford’s tenor sax trasforming my
hopeless cravings into the poetic fluency I live for

___________________

ABOUT LINDA JO SMITH: COMMUNITY ARTIST OF CONNECTION

LINDA JO SMITH —writer and storyteller—born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, graduate of Howard University, alumnus of the 2005 Community Arts Training Institute (CAT), fellow sponsored by the Regional Arts Commission and currently serving on the Commission’s citizen’s panel since 2006.

Linda founded CITY TALES, a storytelling initative that promotes literacy and creativity; Linda founded ZIgZag, a volunteer program at the Juvenile Detention Center in the City of St. Louis.

Linda is a member of Sisters-Nineties Literary Group and has served as the book review editor for the group’s literary publication. Her work is published in Sister-Nineties, Drum Voices Revue, and the St. Louis American. Linda currently provides adult and family programming and reference services for the St. Louis Public Library.

Over forty of Anne’s short stories and essays have appeared in national magazines. She’s taught writing and won fiction awards. Anne writes women’s novels set in the West and speaks on women’s issues and California history. Life has brought her great stories and great blessings.
Anne lives on the Central Coast of California. It’s a pleasure to chat with her today about writing and connections.—JGR
________________

Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture

Riehlife’s Amazon Review of “Ordinary Aphrodite”
Coming of Age Through All the Age

Anne Schroeder’s personal essays in “Ordinary Aphrodite” tell a woman’s story of coming of age during the Baby Boomer generation and growing into greater wholeness. All the ages of womanhood are covered: girlhood, young adulthood, middleage up into the author’s fifties as she shifts focus to caring for the two older matriarchs in her life. Schroeder uses the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexual rapture as a metaphor for loving life in all its forms.

If anyone wants an autographed copy, go to Anne’s website and drop her a line.
________________________

Aphrodite, bless this conversation!

Riehlife: Anne, I know that your latest book, “Ordinary Aprhodite” has created many connections. Tell us more about that.

Anne Schroeder: When a reader tells me, “I cried when I read your book,” I’m thrilled. That tells me I’m writing about the universal “me” that is really me and you and us. The Universal Us-ness, if you will. I hope the “me” disappears in my memoir like the attributions “he said, she said,” disappear in a novel.

My memoir, Ordinary Aphrodite, is a collection of stories about Living in the Moment. This spiritual consciousness is too often practiced only by the very young, lovers in the throes, the very old (if they are also very wise,) and those who live with impending death.

Playfulness can color our path—the million small steps we take while we’re waiting to become rich, or thin, or famous. I want readers to take a breath and reconsider their options. And I love it when they do.

Riehlife:What kind of connections?

Anne: One day I had an epiphany when my manuscript, Ordinary Aphrodite, was with an agent who was doing an excellent job of getting it into publishing houses for a read. But one night I understood that, for me, less is more.

My mother-in-law was living in our house, her healing hip compounded by her advancing dementia. Where was my authenticity as a human being? A daughter? A wife?

Seeking an answer, I reread my book, and the first reader I connected with was myself. The beliefs I had laid out for others became my touchstone. I re-evaluated my needs, emailed my agent and pulled the plug on my New York Plan.

A few mornings later, I picked up the phone to hear a micro-publisher to whom I had sent the manuscript tell me, “I’ve been waiting for the time change so I could call. I’ve just finished reading your manuscript. This is the book you were born to write. I’ll publish it for you.”

Suddenly I was upside-down in my confidence. Early readers helped me through the haze. I sent out advance copies to writers I admired, in hopes of a cover blurb. They responded with encouragement saying they felt my book wise and clear.

My husband got phone calls from his friends whose wives had read the book! One week I caught three women in my beauty shop discussing my book when I walked in. Readers bought copies for their daughters and daughters-in-laws. But something had changed for me. I realized it wasn’t about making the sale. It was about making the connection.

Riehlife: Connection with whom?

Anne: A woman wrote that after reading my book, she returned to her husband who was living in a different state. A single male friend wrote that looking through the window of a long-term marriage brought him to an awareness of what he had missed.

One woman wrote, “You want to know this woman for her differences, and yet you feel sure she is the true you” I love her words. People say that I’m bold and playful, honest and hilarious, but they are only identifying with the playfulness in themselves that gets buried under the serious business of living.

I’m speaking to a wide cross-section of people and concerns: a health fair about nurturing the ADD child; an AVID group at the high school about juggling poverty, marriage, a baby and college; and battered women who want to believe that cowboys still exist. It was a thrill to be featured on Elfreda Pretorius’ WebTalkRadio podcast, “Game Changer”, a syndicated show that reaches 18 million listeners, including 11 thousand libraries.

The connection feels like a baton passed from reader to reader. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I can make my contribution and make my listeners’ eyes sparkle with connection. Especially people who spent the last decade trading connection for material excess—and want to change to something more real.

Riehlife: How do you see a writer’s role in creating community?

Anne: Writing clean makes me feel clean. Writing clears the cobwebs and allows me to live in the moment. Reading clean helps readers do the same. Times are uncertain. People are scared. I wish for my writing to shine a light in the darkness. The gift of writing connotes an ability to translate words into emotions and fears and solutions. That’s why writing is so powerful—laying ideas onto a page can transform the world!

Each of us is given a tiny piece of talent. Mine is that I translate the mundane into images that resonate—a flow of new energy through blocked emotions. By putting my self out there, readers are able to shine their own light. Readers tell me, “I didn’t know we could think (or talk, or write) about that!” But suddenly we are!

Riehlife: And community within yourself?

Anne: Feeling connection is even sweeter than signing books. I wrote a motto to express my purpose. I refined my statement of affirmation through a dozen variations, until it spoke of my soul:

“I write so that my handful of pebbles, tossed each day into still waters, can create a ripple.”

Long walks and discourse with other writers help me unveil my hidden truths. My first language is the language of my fingers. I prefer to write my thoughts rather than speak them—at least when I’m distilling.

The day I finished writing Ordinary Aphrodite, something fundamental inside me felt satisfied. That feeling persists. When I finished, I was afraid I’d written everything in me. Instead, I have to dig deeper.

Readers tell me they laughed uproariously at some essays and carried others inside them for days. That’s higher praise than I deserve. I won’t get to Heaven with my bank book, but I’m hoping to hand-carry a copy of Ordinary Aphrodite to St. Peter for review.

Riehlife: Thanks, Anne. It’s a joy to share in this invocation of thanksgiving to Aphrodite for the safe delivery of your book into the hands of grateful readers.

Susan J. Tweit telling plant stories in Colorado

Janet Riehl performs “Big Butts Are Beautiful”

As a journalist, memoirist, blogger, and speaker I’ve known Susan through two organizations: Women Writing the West and Story Circle Network. We recently had such a lovely ongoing email conversation about “how to find a balance between an outwardly focused life and an inward one” (as Susan puts it) that we decided to move it onto our blogs in an ongoing Blog Duet.

Some of the questions we are holding and exploring in our dialogue/duet are:

–How do we strike a balance between “connection and stimulation on the one hand and solitude” on the other?

(artwork by Edna Patterson-Petty)

–How do we find “our equilibrium between inward-focused spiritual and emotional work and the outward focus involved in creating new connections and tending existing relationships”?

– If we’re always connected, always tuned to other people, how can we hear our own inner voices? [See Susan's blog for how quiet time and periods of rest and anonymity help her listen to the voice of creativity and spirit.]

– What are some places that give us “the comfort of the familiar without the demands of intense connection”?

From left: Bluff House (my spot of ground on Evergreen Heights, hidey-holes, rose homecoming journals…my places of familiar comfort…sorting…and sowing.

**********

Susan says she’s an extrovert-seeming introvert. Depending on the day you meet me, I might seem the same. I learned from taking The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator years ago that I’m in the INFP (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving) zone of the world. In fact, when I took the Meyer’s-Briggs, I was told I was on the line between introvert and extrovert, and I could choose which side of the line I wanted to fall on, based on my own sense of myself. I chose introvert. While I enjoy social interchange, I require large amounts of down time to rest and recharge after forays out. I also learned someplace along the way that I’m a kinesthetic perceiver and learner, and highly tactile.

How does such a person step out into the world to travel…give workshops, talks, appear on panels and so on? Throughout my life I explore the answer to this question. I keep on stepping out of my cave and then diving right back in for comfort and days of low-stimulation, sorting, and sowing anew.

Marion Woodman and Robert A. Johnson, both Jungian psychologists, are two introverts who’ve successfully stepped out into the world to nurture it with their work, but who have done so while nurturing themselves. They have given me hope. Decades ago I read how Marion Woodman, mythopoetic author and women’s movement figure, upon returning from forays out to speak and teach, went into solitude at home and required that. Reading of her way of working totally normalized my own need and experience and I was so grateful to see this in print.

Also, decades ago, I heard Robert A. Johnson speak at the DeJung. (Oops! That is to say, the deYoung Museum…I guess it was the DeJung Museum whilst Johnson spoke for Jung’s ideas that day!) I loved it but didn’t want to put it on the blog or cause you embarrassment! Museum in San Francisco while he was presenting a seminar. He was so brilliant. But here’s what he did that really stuck with me: he announced as the break approached that he didn’t mean to be unfriendly, but that he needed time to rest, and therefore during the break he’d be going to a quiet place to do that rather than mingling with people and visiting. What an inspiring model of setting boundaries and politely and firmly defying and confounding public expectations. I loved him for that moment, even more than all of his books that I’d read…and I really liked his books, too!

As an introvert having “connection” as my platform is tricky and potentially dangerous. Yesterday I asked my Wisdom Self for guidance, and received these words:

My instrument is tuned for the world to move through me.
I care for my instrument to keep it tuned.
I take care in how I place my instrument in the world.

This feels like a touchstone for me. So much information pours into my body and nervous system. I have to have time to sort it all, or I will explode/implode. As a kinesthetic who loves to go into the world full-heartedly, I’ve learned that it’s also important to carry a cloak.

When I told Susan about my need to “carry a cloak,” she told me a great story, and maybe, just maybe she might tell us on her blog for one of our duets. We’ll see.

I was struck by Susan’s analogy of quiet time to let the stimulation of other’s emotions and thoughts subside, my thoughts clear like a pond going still after a rainstorm stirs it up. I use the image of a storm deliberately: what connection and conversation and the stimulation of being around other humans does is very like what a rainstorm does for a pond: it stirs up the bottom sediments, redistributing nutrients, changing the patterns of habitation and flow, and adding fresh water and nutrients as well as other lives washed.

Sogyal Rinpoche, the bestselling author of “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” often quotes a Tibetan proverb: Water, if you don’t stir it, becomes clear. Similarly, the mind, if you don’t stir it, finds peace. When we allow the mind to settle, then in that quiet we experience goodness, our true nature.

It seems fitting that for Susan, who views the land as our oldest community, that she would observe the pattern of the water in a pond and find the analogy to the mind.

Fade out for this first duet.