Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Unfold (ing)

I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly

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In the early 90's, tumbling into an exciting new romance, I spent the better part of two afternoons typing my favorite poems into the computer at the research lab where I worked at OHSU. I still remember some of them: Curiosity, by Alastair Reid; Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden. There must have been at least a dozen. I couldn't wait to share them with my hazel-eyed crush, for him to "get" them like I had, for us to form a deeper connection around those living, pulsing words.

I printed the poems out one by one, and presented them in a bundle, tied with a ribbon.

A few days later, fizzy with anticipation, I asked him what he had thought of them. "Oh, those," he said. "I haven't gotten around to them yet." He saw the flicker in my eyes. "I'll read them soon. I will. Really."

He didn't, and I swallowed my disappointment, but I couldn't fathom why he hadn't pounced on the poems and gobbled them up like candy. I gave similar gifts to others, later - a book of Rumi, a slender volume of Pablo Neruda - always hoping that the object of my affection would be struck by the same line, the same turn of phrase, that I had been.

It took years before I finally realized that the person I wanted to send poetry to was myself.

That the "you" in the poems I loved most was the "you" of the self I was in the process of discovering. That tiptoeing into the depths of such a poem was like stepping closer to meeting Me.

Kind of like a romance: Heart-pounding. Scary. Thrilling.

The poem above is just such a piece.

Where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Yes.

Exactly.

!

Everything I Need

There are many moments and days when I let myself slide into that tepid bathtub of thoughts about what I don't have. When I let my mind linger on what I've lost. When I imagine that there is a hole inside my heart as wide and deep as Forever.

Then are there are moments - like this morning - when I realize that I have everything I need.

My latest epiphany arrived in an email from a client. She was commenting on a draft I had sent her the previous day. In just three sentences, she managed to pinpoint something about the copy that had been bothering me, but that I, being too close to it, couldn't see.

She wrote: "I am unable to articulate this very well but I will do my best to describe via examples. I know it’s difficult not to use (specific phrase omitted) here and there to complete sentences but if we could, I’d like to limit them as much as possible. Rather than telling our customers how great we are, I’d like to give them evidence, specific examples, and “clues” so that they come to that conclusion on their own."

Her feedback was so completely right on that I had to sit back in my chair for a moment.

I thought: I am surrounded by teachers. Wise, wonderful teachers. And as soon as I had that thought, a hundred other examples jumped into my head, of people - clients + friends + random strangers - who have very recently said this or that and it JUST SO HAPPENED to be precisely what I needed to hear at that exact moment.

I get so wrapped up in the details of my life sometimes that I lose perspective. Then someone says the right words, and presto: clarity.

I lack nothing. I just forget that sometimes.

** Photo above: The sky above a certain bench on a trail in the Marin Headlands, where you can sit and gaze out at the wide, vast, marvelous ocean. Not as wide and deep as Forever, but just large enough.

The Garbage You Can't See

Random garbage on a San Francisco street

Today, on Earth Day, I find myself thinking about garbage. About how much garbage I create, how long it lasts, and what my garbage says about me.

I didn't think about garbage until my family moved into the farmhouse.  Prior to the move, we lived in the suburbs, where garbage trucks drove by one day a week and picked up the trash. It was so simple; you put your garbage in a can and wheeled the can to the curb, and it magically disappeared.

When we moved to the farm, there was no more can. No more truck. No more magic.

Instead, we had The Pit.

Before we bought the farmhouse, we rented it. The people we rented it from had dug a deep hole in the ground a few yards from our house; a couple of times a week, they drove over with their garbage sacks and threw everything inside. The Pit horrified my parents. My father, the scientist, knew that things didn’t stay inside of a hole forever; they leached out into the soil and contaminated the ground.

We children were fascinated and repelled by The Pit; we would walk within a few feet of it and try to catch a glimpse of the rat family who lived on the brim. It had a sweet-sour stench on hot days. When people came to visit us, we went to tremendous lengths to keep them away from that side of the house. It was a source of silent shame.

As a result, we became rather obsessive about our garbage. We used multiple bins to sort it out: glass, paper, tin. Food scraps of every kind went to the animals; paper garbage was burned. Tin was flattened, and glass was reused. We tried very hard not to throw things away.

When we finally bought the farmhouse and covered over The Pit, we all breathed a sigh of relief, but we knew: it was still there. Moving, breathing, breaking down. It didn’t go away.

Now that I’m back in a place where the garbage truck comes to pick up the can once a week, I sometimes forget about The Garbage Problem. Then I read an article like the one in the January ’08 edition of National Geographic that shows a warehouse filled with discarded plastic computer monitors, and a photograph of a man in New Delhi pouring molten lead smelted from circuit boards from one pan into another. The caption reads: “His family uses the same pots for cooking.”

Talk about a buzz kill.

What was it I thought I had to have? A new cell phone? A faster laptop? It can wait.

Tea wrote a moving post on Tuesday about how she feels uncomfortable writing about food amid a worldwide food crisis; like the Food Issue, the garbage problem is deeply sobering. Just as my family knew that The Pit would affect our tiny little ecosystem, all of us instinctively understand that our garbage  doesn’t magically disappear.

I know this. You know this. But writing about it and talking about it is a bummer; we'd all rather think about something else, like ice cream. Or chocolate.

But somehow, acknowledging the garbage - talking about it, smelling it, watching the rats scurry over it - is strangely liberating.

I'd rather live in a world where the nasty, smelly stuff is talked about. Hidden, it is toxic. Hidden, it seeps into waterways + dinner plates + arteries and rots us from the inside out.

Exposed, we can figure out a way to clean it up.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Links:

The National Geographic Photo Essay on High-Tech Trash

The Recycling Question: does it make sense to recycle?

Greenwashing the Planet

The Evolution of Me

I had an epiphany last week: food isn’t nearly as important to me as I thought it was.

I mean: it’s still important. But not really.

Wait: I still care a lot about food. Except that I don’t.

Let me try to explain:

One year ago, I was in love. Every week, I scoured the farmer’s market for just-picked fruit and vegetables. I chased down exotic ingredients at obscure markets; I had no less than three artisan cheeses in my refrigerator at all times. I cooked beautiful organic meals several nights a week, which the Moroccan and I ate around our dining room table. We reserved Saturday nights for sushi. Other nights, we explored restaurants between Napa and the City. We were from very different cultures and had vastly different backgrounds, but we were equally enthralled with good food.

I remember a frustrating conversation we had once – I was trying to explain that when he was traveling, I ate very simply, but that when he was home, I cooked for him. “No,” he insisted, annoyed, “you don’t cook for me, you cook for us.”

He was right, but so was I. What I might have said, if I had understood myself better then, is this: being in love with you makes me want to feed you. When you aren't here, food isn't so interesting to me.

Twenty Years Ago, This Ruling Would Have Changed my Life

The past swooped over me yesterday, casting a shadow as it flapped its wings against my ear. It happened last night, when I clicked over to SF Gate and read the headline that California parents are in jeopardy of losing the right to homeschool their children. The Chronicle photo of Debby Schwarzer and her two sons reading books around their dining room table brought back a rush of memories.

I thought about all the mornings, year after year, that my brothers and sisters and I sat down around our round brown dining room table, surrounded by textbooks and #2 pencils. Debby calls her "school" Oak Hill Academy; we called ours Mason Hill Christian Academy. A lot of home schoolers use the word "academy" - there's something fierce about it.

Mason Hill Christian Academy began each school day with two pledges and a prayer: one pledge to the American flag, and one to the Christian flag.

I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands...

Once Every Four Years

Once every four years, a single day slides into the calendar normally partitioned into 365 equal parts: an extra, a gift. A blank white square. 24 precious hours.

Today is a work day for me; my desk is cluttered with papers and pencils and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, but I'm secretly hoping that somewhere, someone is being wildly irresponsible and celebrating this day with some dizzy, spontaneous fun.

Saying yes.

Playing hooky.

Not checking email.

Splashing through puddles.

Giving a second kiss, and a third...

Eating an extra slice of pie. With ice cream on top.

Picking up the phone to hear the voice of a friend.

Booking a ticket for a vacation to someplace magical.

Happy February 29!

Here's to leaping.

I Love You, I Do

While I was growing up, my family failed at Christmas.

There are so many reasons why, and the reasons are muddy and difficult to explain without the companion encyclopedia to our Unique Brand of Strange. Among them are that we didn’t have any amount of extra money to introduce festivity into the season; if we had had the money, it is doubtful that we would have used it to do something Hallmark-ian, because we were deeply conflicted over the commercial nature of the holiday, with all of its tawdry tinsel and tinny bells. The season was, for us, a time to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and yet we despised it more than any other time of year. It reminded us of how different we were, even as we congratulated ourselves for being so high-minded.

I say “we” because, when you are young and don’t yet have fully formed opinions, you absorb the general feelings of the greater organism that is The Family.

I do know that I speak for all of us when I say that we couldn’t wait for Christmas to be over. Every year, we felt a dull thud of dread when carols began to waft over the radio, and we collectively held our breath until the calendar page flipped past the 25th. Most of us still feel a sense of nausea in the pit of our stomachs when December approaches.

Oh, but then came February.

I don’t think that my parents consciously intended to try and make up for our failed Christmases, but when Child Number 5’s birthday rolled around, right next to Valentine’s Day, our collective mood experienced a remarkable transformation.

We draped red and pink streamers from the ceiling. We tied balloons to the backs of the dining room chairs. We made cupcakes and sugar cookies and smothered them with icing and red candy hearts. Technically, it was a birthday party for one person, but in fact it was a celebration for all of us.

After I left home, bitter and resentful at my weirdly impossible family, the tradition evolved further. My parents began to make an event of the day.  One year they organized a scavenger hunt. One year they celebrated at a restaurant in downtown Portland. One unseasonably warm year, they created an elaborate dinner and served it outside. They made Valentines and gave gifts.

Without ever intending it to be so, Valentine's Day became our holiday, a day to escape our usual seriousness and be lighthearted and extravagant.

My mother called me this morning to tell me that they had their celebration last night; all of my siblings who still live in the Portland area traveled back out to the farm for what has become a cherished tradition. They made dinner and played games. "We wish you could have been here with us," she said. "But we put something in the mail for you."

This many years later, my bitterness and resentment have given way to a more clear-eyed acceptance of who we were, and why. And somehow it seems fitting, and wonderful, that this day that celebrates love is the day that my family comes together to laugh, and make merry just for the sake of it.

Today I would like to say to my strange, impossible, weirdly fantastic family: I love you, I do.

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Photo above: taken yesterday - will you look at those gorgeous pink blossoms? If that doesn't call for a cupcake or a piece of fabulous chocolate, I don't know what does. XOX