Apprentice

For the last 33 years I have been learning how to live. When my birthday came this year my friend Melissa declared it my Jesus year-- a lot to live up to for one solar revolution. I believe that I have a soul, a contemplation of energy that meets in me, this body. It is always being made more, different, differently bruised and differently whole. I believe this is the making that I am most active in. It is a practice of making that might not occur to everyone, but we are making ourselves, in collaborative effort with the happenstance of life. Someday I will be a master builder of my own heart, and I will be able to make choices toward beauty (instead of stumbling into it through accidents of grace, which to their credit, can be counted on to happen). Someday I will move with careful arcs, and as my body slows, the visions that it can manifest in the world will be more whole, smoother, will fit in the palm of the hand like a perfect river stone. I am trying to be a maker who can pull together an alchemy of words that changes the reader. How could I ever be far from my master makers though; my mother, my father. I have apprenticed myself to them.

My mother has hands that are always moving across the surface of something, and she is always making it more. She will be sitting, her hands doing the work of beading, or sketching, or sewing, while she is talking to me about my life. My mother has hands with long fingers that are strong, the skin of her hands are pulled slightly with muscle and age, her nails are polished with clear polish, sometimes speckled with paint, and are of medium length. When I was growing up she would bite her nails, cut them to the quick, but after she stopped drinking she stopped hurting her nails, and now they are always fine.  My mother can weave metal and beads into a universe, into a myth. She paints crows and makes miniatures that tell the story of her childhood. My mother held at bay a thousand leaping fears to create.

She is tall, or has been in the past, before her spine started acting up. Her family comes from the eastern block of Europe, and she has an amazing jaw-- square, strong, like a house or a ship. There is a picture of her with my father, standing in sweater and leather boots on the top of a mountain. My mother moves rocks and builds walls. She and my father built the garden in the highlands, and then the garden in Golden, walls and roots and recovering old marbles in the ground like ancient glass artifacts. My mother, even with her hurt spine and the pain in her wrist (braced all the time against age), built wall after wall last year so that they could have a garden in the scrub and sage of a high valley where my parents are living.They pulled from the ground stone after stone, and my father cut plank after plank, until they wrenched out of space an oasis. My mother taught me how to make.

My father plays guitar and writes. Music would drift down through my youth, Beatles songs and blues licks cascading out of the air from the upstairs balcony. He played almost everyday, just for a while. He wrote and made us stories. He wrote us a book, never published, that told an amazing tale of winter. He wrote himself into that book, and me, and we traveled together to save the world. My father’s hands are always rough now, cut, and covered in scabs from the building. His knuckles wider with the start of arthritis. This last year he built the fence that encloses their oasis in the valley. It is a work of art, the planks hand cut and framing your vision of the fourteen thousand foot peaks that stand a few miles away. They lay like lines of music against the living forest and stone, like a poem made of cedar. My father writes moments that are only his and ours, that call his childhood in words up and out of dust.

My father is a big man who laid wood floors for his father. My father was in the military in Germany during the cold war, sitting on the border, listen in on the chatter of the Russians. He says it was mostly drinking, smoking pot, and skiing. My parents met on a train to a ski resort, and again that night in the bar, and were married months later with the idea that they could always get divorced if it didn’t work. That was in the 70s, and this year they built another garden. This year they made a new life, again. My father has very blue eyes, that have seen alpine light and alpine moons. He tells stories rarely, and when he does I want to hold my breath, afraid that he will stop. My father taught me how to make.

Now I have been making myself for some years. It was a slow start, falling in love with the learning how, the asking what, the pain of failing. We fail ourselves over and over. We are always making ourselves. Now I can sometimes grow a plant. Can have the care to water it, and watch it for the summer, and move it from the too bright sun. Sometimes I can make a wall to hold a garden. Sometimes I can move my hand across the surface of a thing and have it come away a tiny, malformed universe. I have written a few good poems. They are rare, and born of hours that seem to stretch like desert afternoons, and I don’t show them to many people. Sometimes I practice chords on my guitar. I have not made it yet to rifts.