Proposal Purpose

Purpose of a proposal is to pledge undying allegiance to someone or some project. In the case of a Book Proposal, it is to hook a potential buyer/publisher, tell her, in irresistible terms, the gist of your writing, show her your chops ~ writing wise ~ and include all the connections you've got that will make marketing easy for her. Plus your CV (curriculum vitae), bio, and how to reach you.

Why did I ever think I could get all this info together and send it by Monday to the agent who said to me last Sunday, "Send me everything you've got." 

Now, I'm in the familiar pattern of my birth trauma ~ needing support to get this all "born!" "Houston, we've got a problem." All this material is not going to fit into the wee tiny space of forty-eight more hours. Bring on the forceps, please, but apply them gently.

Another agent, with whom I had a consult Friday, said, "Get hold of  Michael Larson's book, How to Write a Book Proposal. The current, updated edition." Turns out Michael Larson is one of the founding members of the San Francisco Writers' Conference, which is where I did the speed dating with agents last Sunday and got a nibble for my manuscript, Emergence. 

So, the writing is on the wall... and I need it to be in an email to send by (my ignorant, self-imposed deadline) Monday, August First. Aaaaaaack! Pan-ick  Attaaaack!

No way the books I've ordered will be here in time to read. No way I'll be complete with translating my manuscript from Steve Jobs' Pages program on the MacBook Pro to Bill Gates' Microsoft Word program  by Monday either. And editing? Piffle Poffle... eat my waffle... Each chapter up to Chapter Twelve has been polished to within an inch of its patina. Only nine more to go. What happens if I wing it? Could I write a proposal that will be intriguing enough to garner agent loyalty to getting the word out that our climate catastrophe will only grow worse if all of humanity is too traumatized to "look up" and see what's going on and that we are the only species who MAY be able to shift the demise of the entire ecosystem called Earth? 

Healing our birth trauma removes the basic ingredient which supports PTSD to grow so abundantly in ourselves and in our fellow humans.  Post Traumatic Stress becomes a disorder when the pathways have become so well worn that our only response to what's going on around us is a trauma-based response. We do really stupid things, like continuing to make stuff out of plastic, burn fossil fuels, wage wars, foul our nest, demean women and all marginalized people, abuse children, and practice differentism in all aspects of our lives. 

Healing from the effects of what happened to us on the day we slipped into the world can go a long way towards reclaiming our birthright of joy, creativity, bonding, and sense of belonging in this, the human family. 

Unhealed, our take-aways from a difficult birth can take us all down... down into depression, rage, fleeing, fawning, acting out, committing murder and Gaia-cide.

For Greta Thurnberg, a one-pointed focus comes naturally. Her perspective is among the highest modeled and she wants us ALL to see what she sees: that punching a hole in someone else's side of Lifeboat Earth, means we're all gonna die, not just the one we wish would depart. 

We're all in this together. Could we each, individually, lift our blinders, see that how we got to this point is along the well worn path of trauma that never got healed; that it's not our fault, that there is a way forward? The only game in town is to heal our own nervous system and THEN watch how the ripples spread across the planet to all humans. Collectively, we DO have the capacity to take actions that will mitigate some of the impacts our bad decisions have had on Gaia?

I think we CAN! I THINK WE CAN!!

I think we'd better! Unless Jim Jones was right and we should all drink the KoolAid and leave the planet before it becomes a self-immolating entity ~ a dead planet.

Which feels better to you? Doing everything we can to reverse course and bring life back to earth? Or giving up and killing ourselves and everything else along with us?

Elephants have my heart. Salamanders have my heart. Sloths, penguins, octopuses, and eagles never hurt me. I want to vote for them and for all critters and plants. SAVE THE PLANET!

Won't you join me?

Find out about healing your earliest imprints here:

APPPAH

(AssociationofPreandPeri-natalPsychologyAndHealth BirthPsychology.com)

SEI (SomaticExperiencingInternational.com or TraumaHealing.org)

BodyNamics(R) (BodynamicsUSA.com or https://www.bodynamic.com/therapy/ )

EAGLES!

 Eagles! 

Over my head! Piebald white heads with big yellow hooked beaks... playing in mid-air! Their distinctive cries made me drop my weeding and look up from the Irises. I gasped when I saw these six and eight-feet of wings embrace and roll in one another's wing-arms mid-flight.

Then she flapped ahead. Laughing... 

He caught up to her. They synchronized wing beats.

What a lucky grace to be in the right place at that precise moment to see ordinary blue sky become a radiant canvas for one of Nature's most MOVING pieces of ART!

I've only ever seen birds this size in captivity. Here they were directly overhead flying from beyond neighbor Jean and Joewoen's house, across Cameron Avenue, directly over me and these lowly Irises, which until that moment of Eagle Presence, I thought to be a minor miracle of their own. I love to garden. The task seemed to lose its appeal once these icons of freedom began stitching the air.

I read that male Eagles are better flyers, weighing 10 to 15 pounds less than his partner. Bald Eagles mate for life. Her voice is lower in register than his. She's better at sitting still longer to keep their eggs toasty warm until ready to hatch. He's better at hunting on account of his smaller build and therefore swifter flight and dive. I wish I could've followed them - if only with my eyes, but over the roof, they disappeared from view. I would have loved to see where they were headed. I long to see things from on high...

To see from a Mountain Top's perspective - the entirety of our topography - the landscape of this world; the landscape of the soul. The highs. The lows. 

The magnificent soaring ones were not always graceful, I learned.

Chris and Adam were yoga students of mine in Los Angeles. While they lived in L. A., they also had a second home on one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Canada where they observed Eagles up close and personal. He was a devoted fisherman and watched and learned from Bald Eagles. 

One night, in class we were practicing Garudasana,  Eagle pose. It cultivates balance and one-pointed focus. Chris gave us a real treat - a bird's eye view of how the elegant parent birds teach their fledgelings to dive for salmon in those crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Mama and Papa Eagle soar high with grace and purpose. From on high they SEE the presence of fish and zero-in on one, tracking even as they are in mid-dive, calculating exactly the point they will plunge their massive talons into dinner. Christine acted out the parental role, complete with economy of movement and glide. She then delighted us by miming the baby Eagle's version of that same ballet. It went something like flutter, flutter, SPLAT. No fish. Over and over again. Eventually, they too, learn to soar and dive; hunt and thrive.

We are all eagles... ungainly and awkward as we learn. These United States are, historically speaking, in their adolescence. As a country, we are eager to please, with a teenager's ego-centric desire to be loved by the entire world. We say, ‘Sure, we’ll fight this war for you all. Sure, we’ll export all our frivolous goods, pop-rock-jazz music to you, and our murder as entertainment television and movies. Sure, we’ll crank out humongous carbon footprints but ask you to curb yours.' 

We try to cover over our acne - those pimples of inconvenient truths - that are ripe for picking, squeezing, and draining. And overdue for healing... like our history of genocide at the inception of this America, kidnapping and enslavement of way too many humans as we grew and thrived, and our current IGNORE-ance of the facts that our selfish, myopic actions make a difference (not for the good) in the Natural world. We're beginning to wake up to the fact that floods and droughts, heat domes and ozone layer holes are things we can mitigate by coming out of denial and by taking actions to change our evil ways.

During the pandemic, I knew I wasn't terminally unique when I practiced "Mouse Behavior," detailing minutiae, cleaning and organizing drawers, closets, putting everything in order as if it needed it... which it did, and making masks. Mouse behavior: moving beans and seeds into safe storage as if busyness could curb my panic feelings for what was going on in the White House, the country and in the world. I kept my eye on the smallest things. Frustrated and frightened by the BIG NEWS STORIES.

Coming out of this pandemic, I want to practice Eagle eye viewing again, of everything. I want to climb a mountain to get the higher perspective again. I want to see from an adult perspective the connections among earth, sky, water, sun and all creation. I want to remember that as long as we're all on Lifeboat Earth, my punching a hole in your side of the boat will take me down too. I want to be the voice for the Eagle and for the Mouse and for all creatures in between their perspectives. I want to speak for the disenfranchised. I want us all to reach out and touch someone and embrace the humanity within every single person. I want us to address the systemic acne of our country's very dark history and find the solutions, and to practice reparations. Unhealed, our history will take us down. It already is creating a huge divide among us. Fractious factions. Healed, we are stronger. When we repair... well, as Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places." 

I believe in us. 

I believe we can fly.

These Times

“Sit down,” hollered Mr. Varela. 

All of us junior high students on his big yellow school bus were leaning toward the windows on the right side, squawking and gawking at the gaping holes in people's front yards. It was 1963.  The Soviet Union and the United States were posturing at one another and fear ran high. Not yet twenty years after our country dropped the big one - TWICE… once on Hiroshima and once on Nagasaki. Mushroom clouds and desolation were showing up in our dreams. We ran to look out the other side of the bus. “Sit down right now,” Mr. Varela hollered again. He liked us. He was a really cool bus driver. He must’ve known we just couldn't believe how many front yards had holes in the ground. My mom and step dad already told me adamantly they would never build one... a fallout shelter. Thought it was stupid. If a bomb dropped, no fallout shelter would protect us from the radiation. I wanted to know what would happen to the birds?

Now, 75 years after the big bombs showed us how fragile we humans are, we’re in dire straits. This time with a pandemic. We might do well to have the isolation of a fallout shelter, but we'd go through our hardtack and water rations pretty quick and still need to interact with other people who... well, God knows where they've been and with whom they’ve been interacting. One of those super spreader events could just reach out and getcha! 

Who knows when it will end. Who knows what will happen on Election Day? Who knows if the dogwhistler will have wrangled up enough support to have the Minute Men Militia intimidate people at the polls? Who knows if the rankled might wrestle election workers to the ground and only count ballots marked TRUMP?

I keep thinking of the old curse: May you live in interesting times. 

Well, I guess we're all cursed. We're living through the most interesting time I've ever seen. Who could imagine we'd have a president and vice-president who would allow this great country, with only four percent of the world's population, to have a whopping 20% of the deaths world wide due to the Corona Virus? It's almost as if they’d planned an intentional culling of vulnerable populations. That the president himself came down with it speaks volumes about the respect due this virus. It knows how to propagate and spread itself widely among people who won’t and don't protect themselves and others by practicing the simple courtesy of wearing a mask over their mouths and noses.

My favorite act of denial is the one where someone talking pulls his mask down to warm his chin as if his beard is cold or he’ll be misunderstood if he doesn’t show his teeth. How dense people are. How clueless about how their actions affect fellow humans in their surround. Who do they think they are? Isolationists? Alone in their own fallout shelter? 

Someone said,  “I feel like Mother Earth has sent us all to our rooms to think about what we have done.

Ultimately, I think we will all pull together and get through this and come away with some very useful lessons. 

One is not taking for granted the importance of community, meaningful work and engagement with life. Another is the GREAT GRATITUDE we feel in our cells when our fellow travelers are KIND and generous and civil. How little we truly need. How lovely to return to a human BEING and leave behind the human DOING.

Taking a DEEP breath for the natural world, the birds and trees, rivers and seas… 

We’re all in this together. Let’s enjoy what we’ve got!

Somos el Barco

Somos el Mar

Yo navego en tí

Tu navegas en mí

We are the boat

We are the sea

I sail in you

You sail in me… Chorus from a song by Lorre Wyatt © 1984

What If...

  What IF...

There were a round ball replica of our earth in miniature hovering just above our heads? We could look up and marvel at its bumps and contours, rivers and oceans, the delicate layer of atmosphere, so thin we could move clouds across the surface with our breath. Whoa. Perfection. What Artist created this magic? 

Imagine wanting to change it. What hubris! Try damming a river with your thumb, flattening a mountain with a fist, spraying gasses that kill the greenery or taint the waters. Would the Artist be pleased? Would this masterpiece benefit from our tweaking it to better serve our species?

How long do you imagine this small and fragile globe can limp along with our so-called improvements? Will it survive? We’ve a history of disregarding our rightful place in the family of creatures put here on this beautiful mud ball spinning through inhospitable space. I don’t see another ball like it. Anywhere.

Scientists are saying we're rapidly heading toward a precipice. Like lemmings lurching off the cliff headlong into an abyss. We are hastening our own demise by disregarding the signs from the Mother:  She’s crying, 

“Enough is enough." 

Listen to the lament of the polar bear marooned on a tiny chunk of floating ice, too exhausted to swim back to broader expanses of tundra. It’s all melted. If that doesn’t get us to change our ways, what will?

If the current pandemic doesn't kill us or scare us silly and make us want to find real solutions now, then I fear we humans truly are the least intelligent of Earth's creatures. All the others know not to foul their nests. All the others know not to poison their mother. We haven’t yet learned the first principle: Do what's right for the survival of the whole. 

“Pity this busy monster, manunkind  not…" said e.e. Cummings, followed by, “… listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”  

Here is Mr. Cummings' poem in its entirety:

‘pity this busy monster, manunkind’

pity this busy monster, manunkind

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

——— electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

A world of made

is not a world of born ——— pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnimpotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if ——— listen: there’s a hell

of a good universe next door; let’s go

~~e.e. cummings

Corona Cuts Rule!

Folks are cutting their own or their family member's hair, or both, for better or worse, until a vaccine is found for this dang virus or until safety can be assured while visiting our favorite hair salons to meet with our favorite hair dressers.

I have, for better or worse, been cutting my own hair and my husband's hair and beard for years. Our daughters used to line up for their mama cuts when they were little ones. I took lessons from watching my grandmother's rituals around hair grooming. 

Grammy Florence Stern had hair down to her mid-calves in 1914. She wore it piled on top of her head. While I wasn't born until 1948, she told me stories of how she and her eight sisters used to care for their tresses. On her dresser, Grammy kept a six-inch-diameter porcelain receptacle with a small hole in its lid. It was made in Japan. Into it, she placed spent hairs that came out when she brushed, cleaning out her hairbrush after each session. She would wrap those hairs around an index finger and pop the circle of then white, instead of deep auburn, hairs into the decorated hair receptacle. 

Habits die hard. Once OCD, always so? I keep an empty two-pint-yogurt container with a small hole cut in its lid in a cupboard in my bathroom. Into it... you guessed it! Over the years, I've collected a double-sheet-set sized zippered plastic bag filled with my own curled 'round my finger hair of various lengths and colors - from hip length to shaved-neck length; from henna red to "all white with me" colors, and everything in between.

Our older daughter performs live storytelling at venues like The Moth and Bawdy Story Tellers of San Francisco. She once told a story of coming across that bag of saved hair and asking me what I was going to do with it all. I promised her I would make a pillow stuffed with it for her and one for her sister and even one for the granddaughter! Story-teller Mosa recalls her initial horror at the thought. Then she had an idea. She began combing her cats and saving their hair. She stowed it away in plastic bags thinking someday she'd make a pillow of cat hair and give it to her sixth-grade arch-enemy Terra - a girl who'd stolen something of Mosa's and lied about it.  Turns out Terra was terribly allergic to cat hair or dander or what ever makes allergic people break into hives and sneeze until their eyes swell shut. Mosa was looking forward to the reaction. 

Like so many childhood dreams, the thrill of seeing terrible Terra suffer was replaced by some other more productive dream. I wonder if she still has the saved cat hair?

We have a friend who left Los Angeles fifteen years ago to get away from the insanity of not just the city but of television madness. Elyssa worked in TV game shows with my husband for several series over the course of decades. She retired to Oregon where she bought a working sheep ranch. She always was a productive knitter. She had a herding dog in LA whom she named Molly. Molly had very long fur for a dog, and Elyssa saved the dog's hair/fur for a good long time, carded the fur, spun yarn, and with it ultimately knit a dog-hair sweater! 

I always wondered how it smelled in the rain? 

I do love the scent of lanolin and how wool smells when damp.

When do I plan to make pillows filled with my saved hair? Perhaps right after I finish sewing together the cut out patterns for protective face-covering-masks. The cut pieces have been unproductively sitting on the sewing machine since mid-March when the Shelter-In-Place order came down. Have the good elves yet finished those masks? No, they have not. Will I ever get to complete them? Perhaps not... which means the pillows will be manifest in some distant future, maybe completed before I turn ninety or ninety-nine. Only then will I divulge to the daughters and granddaughters that having my hair in the form of a pillow will magically grant them supreme wisdom as they sleep, because my gray matter has been pushed out into each and every one of those gray hairs. Won't they be surprised to be suddenly SO much smarter? Hah! That's where all my wisdom has gone! Into my gray hair... although, I do prefer to say, "It's all white with me!" Thus is the curse of a pun-dit. With OCD!

I think I'd better shampoo all the saved tresses before bundling them into pillows. I do want those women to have sweet dreams!

Contemplating Cardboard

Cardboard has become a savior in the garden where I spend so much time replacing weeds with plants I WANT to cultivate. The black plastic weed barrier that was put down under mono-colored dark brown wood chips when the realtors “staged” this house for selling appeal is being replaced with whatever cardboard boxes come into this house. Friends and family are also donating newspaper and cardboard to the cause. There's a LOT of yard here - front and back.

While I hate black plastic. Weeds love to grow right through it!

On YouTube there are countless videos about permaculture methods for growing vegetables. Morag Gamble, in Australia, is my favorite teacher. From her, I’ve learned how to put newspaper on top of the earth with wood chips over, covered by a layer of good soil, topped off with hay as a retainer of moisture. In this way, the clay and rock substrata, which is the norm on top of these Oakland hills, is beginning to soften, becoming enriched, actually supporting life again! I see worms multiplying, helping the process by digesting the clay that is hard enough to make dishes!

Gratitude reigns when I’m in the garden. How lucky we are to have a bit of land to support life growing. I see lizards and birds becoming more and more prolific, the more vegetable plants are out-numbering place-holder invasive ground-covers. 

Power over weeds is a tonic in a time when I'm feeling impotent against a viral pandemic, grief for all who have died and how they have been separated from their loved ones, rage over the systemic killing of black humans, and anger / disbelief that we could have a mentally deranged bully in the Oval Office. 

Hard physical labor gets out the angst. Sweat equity makes the zucchini and lettuces taste sweeter than anything we could have others shop for in the store to deliver here. Slowly, the balance is tipping between how much we are cultivating and how much we need to purchase. So far, I haven’t figured out how to grow jars of peanut butter, or cream for the coffee, or, for that matter COFFEE! But perhaps, with enough time and cardboard, even that may be possible. Doesn’t coffee grow on the sides of mountains?

Here’s the thing I marvel at most as I break apart boxes: Some human brain has conceived of a completed, complicated box that has printing on multiple sides, special folding designs so that all that printing is right-side-up when the box is complete, and does the job of holding the product inside. 

The most complicated of these marvels appeared recently when I purchased a crate of delicious, organic, Blenheim Apricots from our local produce market. Apart from the sweet treat inside that held snuggly twelve little square cartons of fruit, the complexity of thought that went into the box fascinated me. HOW does a brain visualize that finished product??

In the 1970s, before children, I had a friend in Southern California - a teacher - who moved back to Georgia in the mid ‘80s. She changed careers and became one of those people who designed these marvelous, ingenious, intricate boxes for many and varied products. Del claimed to love her job. She seemed better suited to the interiority of visualization than holding the attention of thirty-five youngsters in a classroom. Del and I stayed in touch for a long time, but lost contact a few years after we visited her in Stone Mountain in 1981 - after her third or fourth move around the state of Georgia. Wishing I could ask her HOW in the world she could wrap her head around the three-dimensional folds, cut-outs, and printing on these boxes, I simply marvel at that ability and am grateful for her skill and others’ skills to do that!

Now, If I could please have all the cut out pieces to put back in place, then the damned weeds might not poke up through the holes!

The Mouse House by Melinda Maxwell-Smith, Earth Day, 4-22-20

The Mouse House by Melinda Maxwell-Smith, Earth Day, 4-22-20

There was a mouse.

Moved to our house.

It brought a friend.

Invitation without end.

I caught a mouse, 

So did my spouse!

Mouse Number Nine

Seems the last in line.

Humane traps are empty 

Four mornings in a row.

Now, just catching dust, 

We feel a happy glow!

The humane traps have been such a good find. We think the mice were drawn to our Thanksgiving decorations stored in a garage closet - so convenient for tiny mice to enter and set up their mouse house inside of our home. 

Early, on the day that six counties by the Bay declared a “Shelter-In-Place" order, we had a crew of demolition folk bash out an indoor barbecue, smoker, bar, and cupboards we were not using. We wanted to widen a very long and narrow room to repurpose it to our uses, which do not include indoor barbecuing, smoking meats, or serving drinks from a ten-foot bar. When Oakland building inspectors resume work, we’ll have a new multi-purpose room! (IF ever!)

It seems the mouses liked the idea of coming up from their now exposed underground lair to invade the kitchen, laundry area, dining room, bedroom, and pantry! Seeing a sweet little pink-eared mouse-face staring up at me from the cracker shelf prompted us to send away for tiny traps that look like small mail-boxes with breathing holes. They do not harm the mice, only close when they tip the food plate full of peanut butter and grains of rice. The traps are made of amber-tinted see-through lucite. We check them several times a day, releasing the critters, perhaps all kin, into the nearby park as soon as possible. Before setting the trap down in a four-foot tall tunnel of oat-straw weeds and opening its door, we wish them well and say, “It’s been nice. Have a good life. Be kind to each other. Play with other mice.” 

We hope they enjoy their new digs even more than they enjoyed our decorations of dried blue corn and stalks of wheat… and those crackers.

Perhaps we're done with tiny mammalian invaders for a while. I wonder what’s next.

An UNvitation for an insidious Corona Virus? Where’s the trap for that?