Opening the Door to Self-Compassion

July 14th, 2015

DoorwayWherever you go, there you are. Where I have gone is a cottage in Ashland, Oregon. My husband and I are doing a month-long stay here, seeing plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and spending most of our time giving ourselves a writing retreat—I’m partway through a novel, and he’s working on a play.

Our Ashland home, Quan Yin Cottage, is named for the Buddhist goddess of compassion. It’s at the Ashland Zen Center, and in the two weeks we’ve been here, Zen aphorisms have come to mind. Especially, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I thought of it initially on my second day here, when I was starting an entry in my novel diary. As I typed the date, July 1, I heard the words in my head, “Damn, I’m slow”—a lead-in to saying that I’d hoped, in this precious time I’m dedicating to the novel, the pages would pour out of me, but instead I was proceeding at my usual plod.

Wherever I go, if I try to do any writing, that self-flagellating voice comes along. I’m sure this is no surprise to anyone who writes. Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird, my Bible for writing and life, talks about Radio Station KFKD blasting in every writer’s mind. And a recent “Bookends” column in the New York Times Book Review posed the question: “Is self-loathing a requirement for writers?”

I had gone 900 miles from my home in San Diego, a two-day drive up the entire length of California. And there I was, whip in hand.

This time, though, the words in my head didn’t make it to my fingers. Instead, I wrote, “What if, in this holy place, I accept my process? Accept myself?”

LavenderA word about holy places. I happen to believe places have their own energy, both physically and from what happens there. The Zen Center is relatively small and sits so discreetly on the street that the first few days we kept driving past the entrance; we’ve learned to spot it by the lavender bushes on either side of the driveway. There are three buildings—the main house and behind it the cottage and a craft building—at the front of the property. They’re painted a soft yellow and  surrounded by shade trees, bushes, and flowers. Past the buildings are a towering cottonwood (my husband the mathematician estimates it’s 100 feet tall) and a flower garden with daisies, sunflowers, and lots of lavender. Farthest back, you get to berry bushes, mostly marionberries but also some raspberries and a little gold berry, and in a back corner are beehives.

All of it is tended with obvious care. The house is immaculate and in good repair, someone has thoughtfully equipped the kitchen with all the basics we need (and a request for a larger salad bowl was met in seconds). And tending the grounds must be part of the spiritual practice: programs were on hiatus our first two weeks, and the only time anyone entered the yard, s/he was coming to water and prune—moving quietly, clearly mindful about disturbing a woman with a laptop.

Spread through the grounds are inviting benches and signs of devotion: stone statues of Buddha and, in front of our cottage, a serene Quan Yin.

The goddess of compassion visited me again last week. Late in the day, sitting at the desk I placed in front of the French windows, I was about to write, “Major farting around today.” But I stopped and considered: My novel deals with five members of a family. I had just finished a chapter focused on one family member, and I was pretty sure which one I wanted to feature in the next chapter—Rocky Rochman, the 27-year-old who finds God, which is pretty weird for him and his secular family—but I didn’t know what I was going to do with him. As a way in, I had read through earlier Rocky chapters that day and even found things I liked in them. But I had written nothing. Thus, naturally, the impulse to say I’d been farting around.

I decided to sit back and allow Rocky’s story to emerge. As another aphorism counsels, “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and grass grows by itself.” Then it did. Suddenly I knew Rocky’s next step into the waters of belief—he’d start to go by his Hebrew name, which was … I Googled and found a name that so tickled me I laughed out loud: Nachman. I loved the silliness of “ Nachman Rochman.” Plus, that name would connect Rocky to the revered Hassidic Rabbi, Nachman of Bratzlav. And in the next few days, Rabbi Nachman references appeared like gifts from the universe; I went to a class where the teacher quoted Nachman and to a service where the prayerbook included Rabbi Nachman’s Rules for Joy. For instance, “Nothing is as liberating as joy. It frees the mind and fills it with tranquility.”

Which brings me back to self-compassion. Happy as I am that, after I refrained from beating myself up, the juices started flowing, the important shift wasn’t the flood of ideas. It was that I treated myself with respect and kindness.

Wherever I go, there I am. But maybe being in a familiar place brings out only the most familiar parts of myself, and it took coming here to find my inner Quan Yin. I hope she’ll make the journey home with me.

Reading with Reverence – A Subversive Act

January 7th, 2015

ReadingBookIn honor of my birthday today, I want to share a wonderful, healing gift that I received.

I recently met a very wise woman, Lori Thornley, who told me about the respectful, holy way in which she approaches a new book—a practice I think of as “reading with reverence.”

When Lori picks up a book in a bookstore or library, she begins by looking at the cover art and the author’s name. For a children’s book, she also looks at the name of the illustrator. She taught her kids to do this from the time they were little, and they got excited when they saw that same person had written a book and also illustrated it.

Then she looks at the author’s (and illustrator’s) photograph and biography, with a sense of gratitude for the work that’s going into creating the story. Next she looks at the dedication and acknowledgements, seeing the book’s creator(s) in a community of friends and supporters.

Only then does she start reading the story.

As a reader, I’m inspired to bring that kind of awareness to a new book—and yes, it  seems more challenging with an e-book, but not impossible, especially if you resist the e-reader’s default mode of taking you to page 1 and instead start at the cover. By the way, reading with reverence does not require suspending critical judgment. But what about making a thoughtful comment, instead of just clicking x number of stars?

As a writer … Any of us who write may despair at the time, sweat, and angst that can go into even one paragraph, and how quickly—and at times dismissively—our work is read. Lori is a healer, and having this conversation felt like getting bodywork from someone who knows exactly where to touch, even places I didn’t realize were aching … until I felt the relief of having them massaged.

Reading with reverence also strikes me as wonderfully subversive.

It’s easy to see a book, particularly if it’s in a store with a bar-coded price on it, as just one more commodity. In Lori’s simple practice, which takes only a few minutes, she places herself—and the book and the author—outside of that framework of commodification. She makes a human connection between the person who created the world inside a book and herself as a reader about to enter that world. That’s a thrilling imaginative act.

If Not Hillel, Who?

September 10th, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 4.17.00 PMRabbi Hillel? Really? According to a number of sources that you figure had decent fact-checkers—like O Magazine and Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird—Rabbi Hillel wrote the following bit of Zen:

“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”

I was so charmed by this saying when I first encountered it, in Bird By Bird, that I copied it and tacked it to the wall above my desk. Nevertheless—and with great respect for Anne Lamott, whose wisdom has helped me survive many a writing meltdown—I have trouble believing that Rabbi Hillel said anything of the kind.

In case you’re not familiar with Rabbi Hillel, he was the head of Palestinian Judaism in the first century. He’s often discussed in terms of his debates with a rival scholar, Shammai. Shammai took the rigorous, by the book approach; Hillel was more compassionate and invariably won their arguments.

It’s true that Hillel is known for wise sayings. Asked to teach the whole of Judaism while standing on one foot, he said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” Another gem is: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” This one generated some buzz last year, when the center of the Boston Bruins wrote it on his hockey stick.

And Hillel is known for practical as well as spiritual teachings: he invented the Hillel Sandwich, bitter herbs (and, in his time, meat) between two pieces of matzah, eaten at the Passover seder.

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 4.18.54 PMBut “I get up. I walk. I fall down?” It doesn’t sound like the literary style of the man who wrote, “Whoever has acquired the words of the Law has acquired the life of the world to come.” And, in a perusal of on-line information about Hillel, the quote doesn’t appear.

I’m apparently not the only one to doubt Rabbi Hillel’s authorship of this aphorism. In a Google search, it’s often attributed to “Daniel Hillel, American writer.” Look up “Daniel Hillel, writer,” though, and you get an Israeli scientist known for developing micro-irrigation techniques that have made the Negev Desert bloom. Like the first-century rabbi, Daniel Hillel has done a lot of good. In 2012, he won the World Food Prize. And he doesn’t just focus on science. One of his books is The Rivers of Eden: The Struggle for Water and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East.

Still, it’s hard to believe the author of Environmental Soil Physics wrote the Zen-like dancing comment. So who did? I considered Marianne Williamson, the real author of an inspirational message often attributed to Nelson Mandela: “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, etc.”—remember that one?

I did find a graphic image of the dancing quote where it was attributed to Hillel Goldberg, a Colorado rabbi and author. There are quite a few Buddhist Jews in Colorado, so Rabbi Goldberg is my best bet.

But I’m still waiting for proof of the real author. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

Thanks to Manny Rotenberg for allowing me to use some of his beautiful dance photos … and for sharing the lyrics of this Yiddish song: “Sha! Shtil!  Der rebbe tanzt” – Shh!, Quiet!  The rabbi’s dancing!

Mystery solved! At least partly…

Dan Bloom, a fellow writer for San Diego Jewish World, tracked down Daniel Hillel, the Israeli scientist, and asked if the quote was from him. He said yes, though he couldn’t remember if he made it up himself or he’d heard it somewhere. Whether he came up with the saying or not, the scientist is a poet. He ended his note with, “May the Dans bloom.”

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner: A Dance Review

August 26th, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-08-25 at 4.34.22 PMRabbi Lawrence Kushner doesn’t bill himself as a dancer, and I didn’t go to see him Sunday in my role as a dance critic. But the rabbi’s got moves!

Rabbi Kushner was giving a talk in San Diego titled “Jewish Spirituality: It’s All God.” I was interested because I’ve read and loved several of his books, especially God was in this Place & I, i did not know, a multi-faceted riff on Jacob’s dream of the ladder between heaven and earth; it was one of a handful of key books and events that reconnected me with Judaism 20 years ago.

By the way, this is not the When Bad Things Happen to Good People Rabbi Kushner; that’s Harold. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes about Jewish mysticism with what feels like a Zen sensibility. His 17 titles include Eyes Remade for Wonder and I’m God; You’re Not: Observations on Organized Relation and Other Disguises of the Ego. You can hear him on the “On Being” radio show, talking about “Kabbalah and the Inner Life of God.”

Screen Shot 2014-08-26 at 11.40.58 AMHaving encountered Rabbi Kushner’s graceful wisdom and gentle humor on the page, I wasn’t surprised that he spoke in the tradition of Hassidic masters, teaching by telling stories. But I had no idea that he would dance his talk. As he spoke about how everything is connected, his hands wove filigrees in front of his face. He often spread his arms like wings; it’s a gesture any dancer recognizes as breath-expanding and heart-opening.

There was a lovely fluidity to his movements, a quality you see in people who practice contact improvisation or the Israeli form Gaga. What a perfect illustration of how everything is connected: heart, mind, body. And the connection involved not just his heart, body and mind, but ours.

It’s believed that watching other people move stimulates the muscles and nerves we’d use to make those movements in our own bodies. This phenomenon is called “kinesthetic empathy.” So when Rabbi Kushner winged out his arms, it created more space for our hearts and breath. We had new neural networks spinning as his hands described calligraphy in the air.

I thought of Rabbi Kushner’s guffaw-inducing tales as holy shtick, hilarious yet profound. And his dancing was Baryshnikov meets the Baal Shem Tov.

 

Yikes, I’ve Been Studied!

June 17th, 2014

photoI had no idea I was “mak(ing) clear how well popular culture can entertain nostalgia, trivialize history, and relieve, without really working through, the traumas of the past.” Turns out that’s what Laurence Roth, a professor of English and director of the Jewish Studies program at Susquehanna University, wrote about a mystery  story of mine. Roth’s very cool “Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories” came out from Rutgers University Press in 2004. I  became aware of it just two weeks ago, through one of those delightful chains of connection that sometimes happen in life.

My short story, “Wailing Reed,” involves a missing klezmer musician, a young clarinetist for a group I named Klezmania. An older man, a dealer in rare klezmer recordings, asks detective Margo Simon to search for him. The story was published in the collection “Mystery Midrash,” edited by Lawrence W. Raphael.

I was inspired to write the story by my love of klezmer, the wild and crazy music of Eastern European Jews. Back when immigrants were all assimilating, klezmer became one of the strands of American jazz via cats like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. More recently, there’s been a klezmer revival featuring amazing groups like the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Brave Old World, Kol Simcha, and, in San Diego, Yale Strom and Hot Pstromi. (If you want to know more about klezmer, check out Ari Davidow’s Klezmer Shack.)

UnknownI became aware of klezmer for the first time in the early 1980’s, when I heard the Big Jewish Band, led by Ron Robboy. At least, I think that was the first time I heard klezmer. But I felt like I was hearing a long-lost tune, my earliest lullaby. The music grabbed my soul in its fist, and I remember sitting in the audience trying not to sob. BTW, my story opens, “Just because klezmer music made her cry … ”

Ron’s path and mine have crossed over the years. He called after he read “The Tin Horse” because he grew up in L.A. and had relatives who’d lived in Boyle Heights. Last week, he called and told me about “Inspecting Jews.” Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found the book and ordered it that day.

“Inspecting Jews” is a fascinating book. Roth takes genre fiction with the seriousness it deserves. He coins the phrase “kosher hybridity” to talk about, as I understand it, a mix of past and present, Jewish and American culture, and “imperfectly remembered Torah.” There are sections on gender (discussing Harry Kemelman and Faye Kellerman), memory, and “alterity” – Jewish otherness.

The section on memory is where he writes about “Wailing Reed,” with its focus on the klezmer revival and rare recordings. He frames the discussion in terms of the commodification of memory, the way we use  objects “to put (our) hands physically on the past and take hold of its aura.” And he brings in the intriguing notion of postmemory, a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch, in which people “recollect” a past they haven’t personally experienced but nevertheless connect to deeply through stories, objects, and their imaginations … and where there’s the danger that this imagined past can be distorted.

Writing about “Wailing Reed” and postmemory, Roth says, “By using klezmer as a touchstone for the East European Jewish past, Steinberg’s short story asks readers to consider the mysteries of that past’s emotional and commercial tangibility. Klezmer, as an example of postmemory about Eastern European Jewish life, and as one of the sales champs of the American Jewish popular arts, is a perfect target for criticizing the romanticization and commercialization of the Ashkenazi culture to which klezmer gives voice, literally.”

I can’t say I did any of that consciously! But writing fiction is so intuitive, that to the extent any of those ideas were swirling in my awareness, they bubbled into my characters and the story. Though I also like the idea that none of what Roth sees was even remotely in my mind, and he’s done a jazz-like riff on what I wrote.

One of my favorite pieces of the four pages Roth devotes to the story (almost as long as the story itself!) is this comment about Margo’s visit to a club – part of her search for the missing clarinetist, who also plays in a punk-rock band. Despite feeling impossibly old (in her late 30s) to be there, she ends up liking the music, “an interesting if sometimes weird hybrid of rock and jazz, just as Klezmania’s music combined traditional and modern influences.” That quote is from the story, and I suspect it’s only partly coincidental that I used the word “hybrid” and hybridity is a cornerstone for Roth’s analysis. About this incident, he writes:

“The appeal of both contemporary youth music and the klezmer revival is their weird hybridity, their mixing of dissimilar but not dissonant sounds from the past and from the present. The result is neither nostalgia nor an over-hip smugness, but rather emotionally accessible music that, in the case of Klezmania, is capable of making Simon cry.”

BTW, there’s a good reason Roth particularly appreciated Margo’s response to the punk band. It says in his bio that he was a “guitarist and songwriter in several bands on the L.A. post-punk club circuit” and he still performs with a group with the great name Faculty Lounge.

It’s an amazing experience to hear from someone who’s read my work with care and attention. Any time that happens, it’s a gift. But discovering Roth’s extraordinary engagement with my story is like getting a carload of gifts… all of them exactly what I hoped for. Thank you, Laurence Roth, for your deep attention in “Inspecting Jews.” And thanks, Ron Robboy, for telling me about this wonderful book – and for making music that brought me to tears.

Blog Tour Goes to Cafe Bassam and Nia Class

May 6th, 2014

BassamThank you to J. Dylan Yates, who invited me to follow her on this blog tour. Dylan’s first novel came out just a week ago! Called “The Belief in Angels,” it’s about a young woman growing up in her parents’ wild-hippie household … and fascinated by the stories of her grandfather, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Dylan and I recently took our blog tour to Cafe Bassam in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego. You can find out more about Dylan and her book here.

Doing the tour involves answering four questions, which puts me in mind of the Passover seder.

1. What am I working on? I’m about 200 pages into a new novel, “Tower of Song.” The name is the title of a song by the brilliant, mordant Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s “Tower of Song” is a funny-sad lament about aging, and aging is a theme of my book, which opens with the 50th birthday party of Aaron Rochman. Unlike “The Tin Horse,” which I wrote in the first person from Elaine’s point of view, each member of Aaron’s California Jewish family gets chapters in which we see life through his or her eyes. There’s Aaron, his parents (who are divorced), and his son and daughter, in their twenties.

Another connection with the Leonard Cohen song is that there’s a line about being “born with the gift of a golden voice” – it’s ironic when Cohen croaks it out, but Aaron’s son, Rocky, really does have a golden voice; he’s been trying to make it as a singer-musician, but early in the book, he decides to go to cantorial school. The rest of his very secular family figures he’s just letting go of his pipe dream of stardom and choosing something more practical, but Rocky has found God. That’s just one of the complications I’m having fun with. In fact, my writers group tells me that this book is funny! I didn’t know I could do funny, so I am trying to get used to the idea.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre? See, this really is like a seder – why is this night different from other nights? There are a lot of great Jewish family novels, but California Jewish family novels? This wasn’t anything I consciously considered when I started “The Tin Horse” – I just wanted write about a minor character in the detective novel “The Big Sleep,” a woman described as having the “fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.” And, because “The Big Sleep” takes place in Los Angeles in the late 30s, my character had to live in that time and place. I had a sense of Jewish immigrant life in the 20s and 30s through fiction and through my family’s stories, but all of those take place “back East,” as we Californians call anywhere east of the Mississippi. (I was surprised when I moved here to learn that my hometown of Milwaukee was “back east.”)

2014-04-24 17.25.01As I researched L.A.’s Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Boyle Heights, I realized that the Southern California Jewish experience – living in bungalows rather than tenements, having lemon and fig trees in the yard, having the Old Country not just an ocean but an ocean and a continent away – had a particular flavor and character. In my new book, members of the family live up and down the coast – in L.A., a San Diego beach community, the Central Coast, and the Bay area – and I’m doing more with uniquely California settings. (Photo is of jacaranda, which blooms here in April-May.)

3. Why do I write what I do? This question suggests that there’s a choice, that I could be writing something else. But I’m not one of those writers who has a file of 80 ideas and needs to pick one. One idea grabs me at a time, but it really grabs hard.

4. How does my writing process work? I start by creating a diary for the book, where I put down ideas about characters and relationships, story, research needs, etc. There’s always something to research, and I do some of that before I write anything. At a certain point, I’ll hear the first sentence in my mind. That sentence may not survive as the opening – it didn’t in “The Tin Horse” – but it gets me going. I write in chapters rather than scenes, and I’m a linear writer – I do chapters in the order in which I see them appearing. At times, I do go back and rework an earlier chapter; often, that’s based on getting feedback from my writers’ group and realizing I need to go more deeply into a particular character from the beginning.

Writing habits: My peak creative time is first thing in the morning. When I was writing “The Tin Horse” and juggling a lot of other projects, I’d set a timer for an hour or two, as much time as I could carve out, and make that my sacred writing time. And I mean sacred – if I got up to use the bathroom, I stopped the timer. I’ve always been a keyboard person – I wrote my first story at age 7 when I learned to hunt and peck on the typewriter – and I write primarily on the computer. When I get stuck, though, I find it useful to pick up a pen (a fountain pen, black ink) and handwrite; I think it engages somewhat different neural pathways.

carolynNext stop on the tour is Carolyn Marsden. Carolyn is the author of 14 novels for young adults and/or middle grade readers. Her books take the reader on a journey to countries and cultures around the world – including Thailand, Iraq, and Czechoslovakia under Communist rule. Carolyn is also a visual artist, and her work is marked by vivid, poetic images. I have the privilege of getting to swim in this evocative language, since Carolyn is a member of my writers group. She’s also one of my Nia students, and we took this photo before class.

 

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