Posts Tagged ‘Psyche’

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 23, 2009

Last night, a visit from my friend Joe Enzweiler (see the link to his website) to talk about poetry, life, and the writer’s discipline. Joe recently had a poem read on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and we talked about how this might affect his work. Joe is a cabin-dwelling poet, not quite off the grid. He lives in a spruce log cabin he built himself 30 years ago, tucked away in a stand of birches. He has a rotary phone and a manual typewriter, though he was recently given a laptop and has become curious about the internet. But mostly he’s a pen-and-paper writer.

I’ve known Joe since I arrived in Fairbanks from the Pacific Northwest in the late seventies. I joined a writer’s workshop at the university, all young hotshots with big ideas and some gift with language. Joe and I have stayed friends since then, and he has dedicated himself to the writer’s life more profoundly than anyone I know who doesn’t have a university writing program job. Every morning, he rises with the sun (around 10 am, these days) makes tea, and sits by the window and writes. His Manx cat, Little Man hops on his lap to watch the redpolls and chickadees feed outside the window. He gets up from time to time to stoke the wood stove, his main source of heat. At some point, he leaves the house and takes his bow saw and clears small trees from the woods around his house. He cuts the wood into fireplace lengths and hauls it back to his house where he stacks it under his porch. All around the house there’s a mosaic of alder, spruce, birch, and willow stacked with the round ends out. Small wood, but good kindling and plenty to keep him warm and writing all winter.

In the summer, Joe builds things–decks, saunas, sheds, fences–as meticulously as he stacks wood or crafts poems. He loves to stack stone and has built stone walls for his brother in Kentucky and for many friends here.

In the winter we meet for Poetry Thursdays. They keep me focused on the task at hand and give him an audience for his current projects. He’s agreed to let me post a poem on the Poem of the Day page.

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And the Horse (excerpts from a work in progress)

January 23, 2009

Fear and the Horse

To learn about horses is to learn about what we fear and how much fear we can embrace. Think of it–a half-ton of muscle and bone, in personality more like a deer than a dog–and we propose to walk beside it or sit on its back. In the wild, a horse, by all rights, should fear us and we should fear it, too.

And many do. When strangers approach Mattie, I can see the level of their fear. They step back when she reaches her large head forward to sniff their scent. They are awed by her sixteen-hand size, her black coat, her noises. The image of the horse is one of compliance, grace, speed. The reality is an animal only partly tame–like a cat in some ways–whose psychology somehow allows us to work with it to form a braver more powerful team than either would be alone.

Because horses have such good memories, they remember things they fear for life. Horse people tell stories of the horse afraid of men in cowboy hats or of lawn chairs or of anything blowing along the ground. One of the puzzles of working with a new horse, especially one that has an unknown past, is to discover what it fears and to find a way to comfort it with the presence of the rider or handler. This is more easily written than done. A dog trainer once told me that it takes twenty-five repetitions for a dog to develop a learned habit–for that’s what training is–and fifty to seventy-five for a horse. A horse who is truly fearful can be in retraining for years. And all it takes is one bad experience to set it back into fear again, for the memory of fear is stronger than all that training.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 20, 2009

This morning we fed the horses in the dark, as usual, then made coffee and scones and watched the Inauguration. Our friend John came over and we made an event of it–gathering at 7:30am, sleepy still, but sweetened by honey-buttered scones and the joy of the crowd on the screen. After the speech and the hoopla–and after Bush’s helicopter took off for the last time from the White House lawn, we sat and talked and sipped warm coffee as the windows gradually lightened. My son, the dancer, called from New York; I’ll call my brother later today. Now the sun is up above the edge of the ridge; the fresh snow glows with creamy light; everything sparkles and seems new.

We talked about the dark of the year and how it affects us. John is here for his first winter and he’s feeling a bit ragged and sluggish. We assured him that this is part of winter in the far north: the dark and cold settle in together, our blood thickens, we go into a kind of mental hibernation even though we go about the motions of daily life. The difficult time comes when the light begins to return and our energy builds, but the snow is still thickly spread across the ground, the ground itself frozen solid, the deep cold still possible for months to come. It’s friendship that brings us through. When despair creeps into our hearts, a conversation or a good laugh can stave it off for a while. Or it’s our animals. When I need grounding, I go out to the corral and brush Mattie or detangle Sam’s mane–even when it’s too cold to stay out long or too slick to longe or ride.

Still, in the light shining now across the corral–the horses standing still and sideways to it, absorbing every ray they can, storing up energy for the rest of the sunless day-I can feel my own reserve of energy, hope, optimism replenishing.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 18, 2009

More news from the psyche.

Still warm, by Alaskan standards. For a few days, temperatures lifted to around fifty above–for some, a hundred-degree rise in two days. Walking across campus, I felt a puff of warm breeze on my face–unfamiliar breeze, unfamiliar warmth. The lightness this brings to everyone’s mood is remarkable. How can temperature alone make such a difference in all the little troubles we carry? Yet, shedding coats, hats, mittens, even for a few days, we move more fluidly in the world, and spring seems possible.

By today, light snow, and temperatures back below freezing, but still warm, for us. As I write this, I’m thinking of the people gathering on the Mall in Washington, DC, and the change of mood and energy so many of us feel at the approach of Inauguration Day. While it’s not my intention to make this a political blog–there are too many good ones already (see Mudflats in the Blogroll for an Alaskan example)–the changing weather here seems to parallel a change of what? Mood? Politics? National intent?

It’s been a long dark journey through a kind of national despair for the past eight years, when the public dialogue has been driven by fear and impulse rather than reflection and reason. Horses can be made dangerous and frightening by humans who react around them out of fear–perhaps that’s also true of a nation. And horses can be calmed and rehabilitated by a calmer, reasonable presence. Perhaps we all long for that, as well. It’s a lot to place on one human being, to calm and redirect the restless herd of our national psyche, but, as I’ve said to friends here, an election isn’t about one person, it’s about us and who we want ourselves collectively to be. So, as light progresses here, we’ll watch to see how light can be progressively shed on us all with the turn of the political season. I wish for Obama all the best tools of horse and dog training: to be calm, attentive, clear-headed, non-reactive, and to lead by reward and praise rather than by punishment and fear.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 10, 2009

Still deep cold. The weather forecasters are predicting warming trends in three days, but experienced Alaskans have seen this phenomenon before: the cold drags on, we get discouraged, the forecasters try to lift our spirits by predicting a break in the weather in three days; this can go on for weeks. So we’re in that part of the cold spell.

At this point, after this much cold, the effort it takes to do anything begins to seem normal. The car needs to be plugged in for an hour before turning it on, then it needs to be warmed up enough that the heat inside the car melts the ice around the gas pedal, then when we drive off, we move slowly, bumping along on flat-sided tires. Going into and out of the coffee shop involves a comical amount of taking off and putting on mittens, gloves, scarves, hats, layers of jackets and sweaters, snow pants. And we make foolish mistakes-taking our gloves off to adjust the buckles on the horse blanket can lead to cold fingers and cold fingers can frostbite. After being inside or driving through ice fog all day, we decide to walk the dog at night. The dry air makes skin itch, makes sparks of static snap between people and dogs, people and partners. We snap, too, as little irritations itch at the space between us.

So, I look at seed catalogs, the luscious colors of beets, cantaloupes, carrots, lettuce. In three days, they say, we’ll be above zero-maybe above freezing (but don’t count on it).

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 8, 2009

Here’s news of the psyche.

Deep cold persists here. At forty below or colder, metal becomes brittle. Things break. Anything plastic can shatter at the slightest bump. And the psyche, usually plastic and pliable, becomes brittle, sharp-edged, and dense.

We are all waiting for the cold to lift and tallying up the list of broken things to repair: frozen pipes, a car window that won’t roll down, a phone line inexplicably dead, our frayed good will. It takes so much effort just to get the car started and drive to town that we do without things like ice cream rather than go to the trouble.

In a few days, the temperature is supposed to rise above zero. Next week, the first of a series of meetings and other activities starts. These dark days, the last of Winter Break, the first of my sabbatical semester, will seem such a luxury in memory once the activity of spring begins.

Spring, however, is a matter for the psyche here in the Interior–we’ll have snow till late April, into May (ah, even writing those words brings some relief). Spring finds its way to us through dreaming of gardens, browsing seed catalogs, beginning the slow conditioning of horses for the first day of good footing and riding. Then, in a day, the snow will be gone, the birches will be a cloud of yellow-green, the cranes and geese will babble in the sky, the horses’ coats will shed in ragged patches, and the garden will already seem behind schedule.

On the radio, just now, a warning about ice fog, bad air quality, driving with lights on, or better yet not driving at all.

Thanks to all who’ve visited this blog. I’ll post more poetry challenges, for the psyche.

Update: 11:30 Alaska Standard Time–Sun on the eaves for the first time in weeks.

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