The Lost Art of Conversation

Sometimes you don't know what is missing in your life until you see it...or more precisely, you FEEL it.  Like an old jacket pulled from the back of your closet you know suddenly you have missed it all along, and just adjusted to living without it.
    How easy it is to forget.  In 1995, my husband and I took a three week trip to Greece.  On the tiny island of Tinos, we prayed for a  child before the miracle working icon of the Virgin, and relaxed into the simple rhythms of village life. The water was an indescribable blue, the air smelled of chamomile, and the food was delicious.  Every day the village closed all the stores and shops at 3:00pm and the inhabitants returned to their homes for naps and family time until the stores reopened after 5.  One day at the end of one of these breaks, reclining peacefully on my twin bed, I "felt" an old memory lagging at the back of my head.  At first it was shadowy and faint, but as I lay there it crystallized and became clear.  It was the sound of children playing in the streets that struck such an old chord in my mind.  The clacking of jump ropes on the sidewalks, the sing - song prattle of playground rhymes. the trilling child voices calling out in hide and seek. "How long had it been since I had heard these sounds?"  "When did I become accustomed to the silence of the American neighborhood?"
Here in Tinos, televisions were a rarity, the only time my husband and I saw one was in a local taverna where all the neighbors had gathered to watch "The Life of Jesus Christ" Children here in the town played outside in the afternoons as they had for centuries, without the need for self absorbing television, video games,computers. They learned how to socialize with games and play the way we all should.

The adult equivalent happened to me recently. My mother and her boyfriend recently married in a small ceremony in their home outside of Pittsburgh. Following the intimate ceremony there was a brief time for cake and refreshments, where we all mingled and introduced ourselves to each other.  Then as if on cue, we all settled down into seats and began to talk. Verbal bantering, mock challenges, and warm acceptance enveloped the group as each person revealed unique pieces of their character.  Stories came flowing out, many of them funny and revealing. This was not all family, although there was family present. Many of us were strangers before this day. It all just FELT so familiar!  Again, that sense of an old comfortable memory pulled at me as it had in Greece. "How long had it been since I sat in a room filled with people and had relaxed intimate conversation?' Somewhere back in my childhood I am sure...at family picnics, with cousins late at night, maybe in college with friends of like mind.  Nowhere had it happened in the last ten years I am certain.  The constant interruption of everyday life keeps us away from the process of conversation.  Phone calls, appointments, kids schedules, and distance all  conspire to keep us from having meaningful conversations with each other.  Conversation takes time, the ability to listen and a genuine respect for others opinions and values. The division in our political system  also reflects our societies inability to have these conversations. Maybe if we had a bit more conversation, we could come to more acceptable solutions for the American people!
I advocate today for more time to talk, listen and accept each other.  Let's all sit around with coffee cups and wait for what will come out if we give it time, let's get excited about getting to know one another again and let's surprise ourselves by having a conversation that is worth something to us.

Lunar Eclipse

The last time I saw a lunar eclipse,
     I was a little bit drunk,
stretched out on a dune at a Newburyport beach.
There under the clarity of a midnight sky,
    wrapped in the warmth of blankets and wine,
the
moon
faded
away...
the clouds, like dark kites blowing about the
    fading man's face...
until only the rim
    like edging on a dinner plate
shone on.

The next day,
    the man in the moon was Tom's father;
and the shadow was cast,
    somewhere in his brain,
like a clot,
    and he fell
and almost vanished
    but for the ring
which like gold
   shone on.

I was six years younger then
     and every shadow I had somehow dodged -
forbidden to fade me.
Tonight
the earth sifts again.
ever so slowly.
turning into the suns rays;
like the fears of my childhood,
creeping
over
the only light that shines in my night sky.
"today you are young ,and tomorrow you are old"
Time I did not know was passing until this night,
under this moon;
I remember the changed face of a man I loved.
"How did I come to be here?"
in this darkness,
riddled with shifting shadows
    like the bark of this chestnut tree
    and the back of the spotted newt?"

In the passing of this moment:
this moon,
I am eclipsed,
and I am changed.
1995


Musician's Hands

 Mesmoizing hands
    that in their violence bring forth song
Mastery and tenderness
    weaved artfully in tendons.
Knuckles, nail and bone
    captivated with anticipation,
deserate to match the fingers to the soul.
"Pinky, Play, Play"
    Masculinity marked with gentleness.

Pinky, Play, Play...
    "do these hands belong to someone I know?"
The heart lies unveiled in it's movement.

How I envy that which in diligence and loves
   wooes forth a tune
and in striking notes
draws out the song.
1981

Publication and OUCH!

You may be wondering,"Has this person ever published anything?"  Fair enough question.  All writers ultimately aim for publication and acceptance of their writings by the larger society. It gives verification to our hard work , and some times it also gives us money, or fame or both. It can be a long process and often a painful one as you receive letter after impersonal letter explaining why your precious work of art doesn't fit their marketing needs! Patience and persistence is absolutely necessary characteristics of the writer,  Below are two of my published works, enjoy them.



The Beatitude of Tears


by Glinda Johnson-Medland



“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”



Not so long ago, I lost an unborn child that my husband and I had spent seven years waiting for. I grieved for that tiny person as I had never grieved before. I wondered if I would lose my sanity with the passing of her life. The mourning was more difficult; for if grieving is our internal work, mourning is our public face.



I had never realized how much grief is stifled in the United States. Many people did not understand my deep sorrow over an unborn life, or they sought to assure me that this loss was for the best. When I began to cry in church, I was offered allergy medicine by one person, eye drops by another, but never a tissue — never a hand of understanding.



I began to see grieving in the eyes of all those around me; grief over lost ones, lost ideals, lost youth, lost love. What frightened me was how little mourning I saw, as if all the grief were trapped behind the eyes of the knower.



I looked at this beatitude suddenly afresh, with eyes wounded and tear filled, and realized that God was giving me his blessing even in the darkest time of my life. We often fail to see the Beatitudes for what they are: Jesus giving his blessing to some of the most despised and wounded individuals in the community.



Here he was, surrounded by epileptics, demoniacs, paralytics, diseased; crying, wailing, begging to be healed and Jesus turns to them and says, “Blessed are you: beggars, mourners, hungerers, persecuted.” This was not a teaching so much as his “affirmation of” and “empowerment through” their suffering.



To grieve means “intense mental anguish; deep remorse — acute sorrow. It comes from the Latin word gravis: to oppress, or weigh heavy upon. Mourning is “to express public grief for a death by conventional signs.” Many cultures put a heavy importance on mourning — people dress in black, wail and cry, tear their clothing, or cover themselves with ashes. In modern society, we make our dead as pretty as possible — “Didn’t he look good?” — and bury them quickly. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke expressed it well: “Once, ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night when it is silent. Where can I find such customs now? … I would like to fling my voice out like a cloth over the fragments of your death.”



The people that Christ was blessing were those whose grief was public. Without mourning, we can not be spirituality or emotionally healthy. This blessing was and is a call to allowing ourselves to be honest with others about our sense of pain and loss.



What is holy about mourning, that Christ would bless it? First of all, it creates transparency in people. It tells people we are in pain and we have experienced some type of loss. It opens us up for others to know. What we grieve over and mourn for reveals who we are. If we mourn our lack of money, it betrays our values. If we mourn child poverty, it exposes our heart.



Mourning is also a concrete act toward dealing with our grief. It helps others aid us in our working out of that grief. We all know that talking about loss and sadness does not touch our hearts and change us in the way that seeing somebody cry does. In the moment of the trembling lip and stifled sob, our hearts break, and we are changed.



The shortest verse in the Bible, is appropriately, “Jesus wept.” There is nothing else to say, his tears have spoken.



The second reason why mourning is holy, is it helps us integrate our grief. The inability to appropriately mourn losses, results in depression, psychosis and physical illness. Until we can live with the reality of the loss of a loved one, the loss of a particular relationship, the loss of a piece of who we once were, we have not integrated our grief. In a way, we are not living in reality. We have not integrated our values and beliefs.



I believe the spiritual path is one of integration. We need to be balanced people who reveal Christ for and in the life of the world. In the Orthodox tradition, there are saints known for, “the gift of tears.” These prophets are able to mourn the sins of the people, the neglecting of the poor, the dying of the innocent.



As we look to the words of our Lord, and His blessing on those who mourn, let us be confident that mourning is a true gift. Mourning is available to us that we might let our sorrow, sadness and grieving come out of us. Mourning is available to us that others might support us in our grief. Mourning is available to us that we may be washed and comforted with tears.



Glinda Johnson-Medland is a therapist living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Raised a Baptist, she was recently chrismated in the Orthodox Church, taking the church name Xenia.



reprinted from the Theophany / January 1997 In Communion (issue 7)



This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currentl

The following was accepted and published in Decision Magizine, May 1985 issue.  I was also paid $12.00.which made me very happy!

Christ's Pardon

He waits for us in these perilious times
     as a soft shadow,
eluding every self made movement
     in silence;
until in desperate humility
     we reach for Him.......
and only then -
     fleetingly,
our fingers touch.

12/83

More stories ...and a bit of an explanation...

Sooo I love stories... And I have a few more for you, but I thought I had better explain to my followers a few "minor" things. First, I am dyslexic, as you might have noticed, spelling errors show up in all of my writings. I could proof read them MORE, but then you might never see them, and that would be a loss for both you and me. A poetry teacher once told me I needed to go back and take a basic English course, and that comment stopped my writings for months and wounded me something awful. For me that professor was not particularly helpful, I only resented him after that.

Don't listen to what other people say. People that need to write do so for their own sanity and enjoyment. The fact that I might help other people, or communicate a message is secondary to me. I need to write to figure myself out,,, and make sense of my world. The gist of all this is that I will ask you to overlook some of more obvious spelling errors and try to hear the "voice" of the poem. If poetry is about finding your voice, I have found mine, and I hope you can hear me even with the misspellings. I can always hope!

I am also a very wounded person, who as a child experienced physical emotional and sexual abuse as a very young child. I have struggled with depression most of my life. You may see this "darkness" in my writings at times and many people are offended and put off by it. it is a part of who I am and so it comes out in my work. It is probably the primary reason I have had trouble publishing my work, as I have been told by other writers that most publications like to leave the reader with a sense of well being. Hurt exists in this world....and sometimes in very primitive forms that hit a very visceral nerve. I see hurt because I hurt and I don;t want it any other way. I want people to feel when they read my poetry, and maybe we all need to voice our pain a bit more honestly in this society. So if my poetry makes you sad, or angry or melancholy, that is OK.. I want you to feel. I want you to feel and think about doing things in your life a bit differently, or looking at the stranger next door as a flawed human being. Anyway, enjoy more of the story variety.

Guilty

Already I forget his name,

child with the almond eyes and dark walnut skin,

whose face peered out from the nightly news.

An impish smile frozen on a magnetic screen,

For three days,

four nights

twelve broadcasts

every newspaper

they searched for that little boy.

Combed the junkyards,

questioned the neighbors,

brought out the dogs.

They flashed his name and face on screens across the state,

until the image of his wide - eyed grin haunted my dreams

like an unconscious retinic image.

At some point his brother told the cops to check the freezer

and there they found him

his severed limbs as delicate as fawns legs hidden in the ice.

Already I forget his name,

as if his four year old life

wasn't short enough

to end.

Severed limb from limb with a butchers knife

like one of the Innocents

killed by the sword in search of the Christ Child.

Already I forget his name...

as if his four year old life wasn't short enough to bring me shame.

Four tar - small footprints

stain the slate I walk each day...

and still I cannot know his name....

like a breath whispered

and gone,

his eyes still smiling from the TV screen.

Today I walk this sidewalk weeping

for a child as unseen as the ghost

who left these marks on the walk of my everyday life.

Spring 1994

The next poem is an actual revealing of my family's ancestral history, which surprisingly included the fact that my grandfather was listed as "mulatto" in the 1830 census. His mother was listed as "colored". It brought some light to some old family myths and stories that was part of my up bring.

Passing Over

All those years of sister's teasing

"Nigger lips, nigger nose"

and wondering why Nana bought me dresses and haircuts.

Told me at the age of eight

"Don't leave flowers on My doorstep"

Why all those years my cousins were accepted,

but my sisters, brother and myself,

were not.

We were not in a very real sense.

All these years of plaiting their hair

holding their hands

smelling their skin:

All those years of holding them in the rage of their fear

and maybe this family secret is why I came here a century ago. (*1)

All those years I wondered "not what?"

This winter I went to Florida to see my grandparents.

My great Uncle Ralph

asks me in a line at Universal Studios

"What tribe did your father belong to in the Caribbean...

EXACTLY?"

My Nana states at dinner

"You can always tell bi racial children by their noses"

and everyone falls silent as they stare at the center of my face.

"Not what?!"

"Not white??!"

"Not completely??!"!

Now the innocent joke my mother has told

isn't funny..

about how following my birth she told the nurse

"you've brought me the wrong baby!"

and pointed to the colored woman in the next bed.

"you were just sooo DARK... My mother laughs,

" ......A head full of long black hair"

I should have known then,

the taste of the color I had been born in..

All those years my father taught

in the small town school

was ridiculed,

shunned,

isolated,

scorned,

mocked,

never befriended despite his friendliness

until finally he took an early retirement at age fifty.

Maybe the same person who told his peers

was the same one who told my Nana

he would never sell his house to that black man and his wife.

My mother should have known then,
      the taste of the color she married in.

All those years I should have learned to hate something...

it was "what ?" exactly?

I didn't know..

It wasn't in my father's nature either

it wasn't in his skin

to hate these people that didn't know the taste of the color of the world they had been born in.

never lily white

always a shade of difference.

This year I got a taste of the color I've been bathing in,

sometimes nutmeg brown,

sometimes coffee with cream,

sometimes tar baby black,

but always...

"you've got you father's beautiful skin!"

gardenias are white

although if you look closely I'd say they look like ivory

,But white enough to be my nan's favorite.

That was my gift to her

a plant that will not die beside her doorstep

a plant whose tropical exotic scent

sweet,

heavy,

like the grease on my child's hair,

will forever betray the orgin of it's snow white blooms.

*1 I worked in a residential facility outside Philadelphia with abused children for almost 20 years.

Stories,,,,,,

I love stories. Now that my two children are too old for me to read to them everynight, I miss it very much. In truth, I think I enjoyed it more than them! Stories tie the human race together and force us to accept our commality. I have seen on more than one occassion when people were unable to listen to any form of reason, they will listen to a story. It's human nature. You can't help but to pause and listen. People want to hear the end, they want to ask questions, they want to know what happened to the charecters. Jesus told stories, because people listened to them, and he could reach them on a whole different level than by arguing or lecturing them. Lecture by the way has been known for a few centuries to be the least effe ctive method of teaching, but is still the universal standard for public school teaching.



We as a society have lost the ability to tell stories. Thosands of years ago, oral traditions were passed down generation to generation through stories told on cold winter nights through elders and respected relatives in the community. They taught morals and lessons, provided hope and direction in times of crisis and imparted tribal identifications and connections. I learned the art of storytelling from my mother, who proably learned it in the depression. She would drive around the towns of her childhood in Northeast, Ct. and tell us about the adventures of her growing up. The time the dam opened while her and her sisters swam downstream, The rat that bit her finger as an infant, the caves and hills the "Leatherman" lived and walked through. I loved these stories, and to this day they remain a huge part of who my mother is to me now. At many a training and staff meeting I have secretly wished "oh please, somebody tell me a story!"

we have lost a lot in losing our stories.

Stories don;t have to be true, however they usually start from truth or have peices of truth woven into them. I get frustrated with people who ask me "is this true?" about my writings. A good story is aLWAYS better than the truth! the truth is somewhat irrelavent....I want a good story!!

So tell a story, or write a story, or as the kids always say "TELL ME A STORY...........AND MAKE IT GOOD!!!

A few poems in story form...

Trackings

I think my cousin Patti
choose the color pink for her footprints.
This was long before the rose granite headstoner was lugged in by hand
to mark my grandmother's resting place.


Naomi,my sister was the youngest then,
only three, new at walking.
She refused to take off her shoes
fussing
till I was afraid gramma would sing a siong about how we always made her cry..
gramma didn't sing today,
only handed her the yellow paper
and hummed as she watched us work,

I helped Naomi trace around that hard shoe,
guided the scissors through the paper
until her steps spread around us like a carpet of sunshine.

My grandmother almost died the year Naomi was conceived.
My mother spent her pregnancy waiting in hospital hallways-
wondering which visit would be the last
always fearing that these child that lay curled in her womb,
as yet, unknown, unnamed,
would be born into a void - unfillable.

My grandmother told those doctors she would live to see this grandchild born!
and "DAM IT!" they should have listened
because she did.
Now Naomi was walking and that beat all the odds!

That day before the sun had set,
every grandchild had left their soles on her walls, and her ceiling.
Each of us leaving a trail of footprints to remind her of who we were after we'd gone.

Patti's was pink
Mine red
Naomi's was yellow.

Naomi is twenty now....
She told me she doesn't remember Gramma:
and a look as empty as those hospital hallways crosses her face.
I tell her I know -
because buried in my mother's old trunk,
we still have the toeless yellow foot to prove it,
I tell her
she was there.


The Call of the Wild ( for my brother)

There was a time
when the call of the wild
shone clear in your wolf eyes;
one moment green, then grey,
the flash of silver fur
seen as the slash of summer sun on your tanned shoulders.
We hoped then
we would always run free;
as wolf and child,
brother and sister,
under the canaopy of leaves.
We tracked the mink and owl,
the hawk and falcon,
trailed them from tree to tree
stopping only to stretch our bodies by the creek.
The wolf had no fear,
neither the deer
only games, mock battles,
desperate chases, feigned death....

Till the night without a moon,
he chased her, the deer;
through a feild of milkweed flowers.
Almost upon her,
he dodged between two poles,
felt the sting of metal barb across his cheek,
the tear of flesh beneath his chin...

and oh the wail.......the wail of the wolf
the wail of the wolf turned boy again!
and the blood,
red and sticky in the black night
warm as life
as we struggled home, to the hospital,
to return
with thirteen stiches and a scar on his throat that would last forever.