ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I recently got a direct message on Facebook from a high school friend I haven’t talked to in many years.

“Do you still have that picture of you and the ghost in Africa?” He wrote.

I sat there staring at the screen, thinking it funny that after so many years, this friend would still remember and even want to see proof once again that I had in fact, a run-in with the dead.

I hadn’t seen the picture in many years myself so accepted the challenge and dove into the closet that I knew it would be in-the one containing my dogeared travel trunk from when I was 19.

In this trunk is anything a human being would want to intimately know about me from the ages of 12-26: Kodak envelopes filled with negatives and blurry pictures of travel and boyfriends, shells and rocks from a beach in Cinque Terra, Italy, bits of the Berlin Wall, my silver monogrammed cigarette case, a blood red turban from that weekend in the Sahara, my memere’s vintage National Geographic maps and stacks of private journals documenting daily experiences from coffee shops, bows of ships, southwestern desert ruins and deep in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest.

If you’re anything like me, once you open a portal that big, you have to just dive in. Flipping open my very first journal, messy handwriting chronicles sleepovers, dreams of kissing boys and whole pages where I just wrote “Fuck you mom and dad!!” as if it would help being a tween in 1982 with the world on fire and a Marlboro clenched between my teeth.

Leaps forward to high school and college prove the most lethargic with Kate Chopinesque awakenings that pushed me off the island of Cape Cod for the first time and onto a plane bound for Florence, Italy and school and new friends who knew nothing about me, except that I had a foul mouth, was a “writer” and proved to be an exceptional candidate for painting and sketching countless pictures of.

Flipping the pages, dried flowers from mountainsides, locks of hair and train tickets fell out on my legs. History.

It was during this time living in Europe that the ghost picture came to be. It was spring break, in the outskirts of the Sahara, and we’d just pulled our Jeep up to a cave inhabited by an Arabic woman tattooed with a lizard from her lip onward down her neck. The story itself is strange and long – how we got to be in this woman’s cave home – but we suddenly were and the woman never left my side, looping her arm within mine, staring into my face for the tour and appearing downtrodden as we left.

We figured she was just lonely, I mean, she lived there alone. This was verified by my travel mates who will vouch there was never a little girl there. Much less a girl in a burial gown that showed up months later back home in the famous picture.

But back to that old friend.

When I began searching in the trunk for the picture, I thought of why my friend would want to see it again. Had it altered his life somehow? Did he need to believe there was life after death? It certainly altered mine and the group I ran with at the time. It became an image we all came back to over coffee to ask “Why?” and “How could it be?” as it was perpetually side-lit with sandlewood candles and surrounded with bits of broken shells and sand.

I’m so sorry to say I did not find it, but have hopes it will one day tumble out from a book or be in my hand one sunny morning reaching for a pair of socks from the back of a drawer.

One thing I do need to point out is that this friend, who I wrote of at the beginning of the column still has not heard back from me about this picture. I came to the selfish conclusion that this was my history and I could write it however I wanted and he could write his own until just very recently, reading Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook.”

Didion writes: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

I wonder if this is how it was for my friend. Lying in bed with his wife, reflecting back on that lost time post-high school where he learned something he could never plainly label. Being a man of substance – a firefighter and a Sunday church goer, he opens his eyes in the twilight with a sigh and remembers that one piece of the puzzle that never made sense. That made him question and question and question “what if?”

Perhaps it is only our histories that in the end keep as a sounding board – our biographies that tell a billion histories from different perspectives. One, no more correct or truthful than the other. Each and every one part of life’s amazing puzzle.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: Moyan Brenn

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I have just returned back home from running around Manhattan and New York Fashion Week. As you might imagine, an intense week full of long legged runway models, moody designer presentations, and the deep bass beats of stylish music gives New York City the air of theater, sex, and retail desire. It’s also a week-long voyeuristic sneak peak at what we all hope to be wearing next spring and summer when emerging from our winter cocoons.

Fashion is sexy. It serves as both a transformative power pill and a retreat for the world-weary. It’s a place we can go to to become stronger by the very clothes we wear and in lieu of the fact that our inner strength isn’t enough. Power is sexy. If you think I am wrong, point me to the runway show you’ve been to recently that shows women hunched over in house dresses looking down at the ground from nerves.

Fashion is all about power and I couldn’t help thinking about it this past week. There were even times when photographing shows I put the camera down a little in order to see the model walking at me with my own eyes instead of through a lens. Some of them reeked of this confidence so much that I laughed out loud. It’s their job to trick us into believing that a certain look is all we need to get by in this world. It is their job to act as a visual representation of a designer’s ideal, a paper doll with folded tabs that takes off and puts on outfits that when our own, will help in terms of better jobs, business deals, romance and getting the job done.

While I am lucky to be covering sustainable fashion 99% of the time, where designer’s “About Us” pages tout social responsibility, closed loop technologies and organically grown fabrics, most of the fashion industry is just not there. Nor does it really care to be.

Case in point, waking to a story this morning on the Pakistan garment factory fire that has left (as of the writing of this column) 289 dead. In this, the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history, we are left to scratch our heads and wonder how this could be or maybe we don’t want to look at it too closely at the risk that it will tell us something about ourselves.

The “Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, told Bloomberg by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents also claimed 419 lives in 2008.

The Karachi garment factory itself had locked fire exits, barred windows and there wasn’t a sprinkler in site. A single staircase connecting four floors became kindling for a boiler in the factory that burst into flames, engulfing all floors that were connected to it. Workers chopped away at the bars with tools to jump from 4th story windows – pregnant women, old men, nephews, aunts. People trying to make a living so that society could wear something new.

I recently interviewed Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Cline told me, “To our credit, it took consumers several decades to be convinced that they no longer wanted to own beautifully made clothing and to make them forget that $20 does not in any way buy a well-crafted garment.”

In a fast fashion crazed society, where we want more, faster, cheaper, we will always have stories like this in the headlines. Hard-working people who will accept being modern day slaves to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

You will read all the headlines on this factory fire story and it will stay with you for a bit, until you need a new shirt, a pair of boots or a party dress. You might even consider the tragedy when you walk through the front doors of your favorite fast fashion chain. But you probably won’t be able to stop yourself once you hear the deep bass beat from the well-positioned speakers, the beads and bold colors merchandised like candy, the other women around you, arms laden with pretty dresses at $19.99, and how could you?

You were conditioned to shop this way. But let me tell you something, I think you can start walking past these stores, in fact, I think you can stay out of the mall entirely. I think you can plan ahead and look for the right designers who don’t have factories like this – who pay their workers fairly, who let them work from home who don’t treat them like animals.

People often tell me I can shop responsibly because I know so many designers, I just “know how to do it.”

But knowing how to “do it,” and realizing one has a responsibility to “do it,” are two completely different things. One requires making a call to the eco-boutique or hitting the local consignment shop and the other? Well, that requires lowering the camera and looking at life with a real-life lens.

It requires considering not just yourself, but the lives of many others.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: From NYFW to the Garment Factories of Pakistan appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Each day we wake up with hope. You may not realize it, but every morning when you brush your teeth, make a part in your hair, swipe your metro card or open the front door, you are subconsciously convinced that today will be a new, hopefully better day. If you were not, you would stay in bed, your teeth would rot, your door would be covered in spider webs from lack of use. Any opportunity you thought you might one day see? Gone.

Opportunity can knock more than once but it gets tired too.

But consider that you are that person putting coffee in a to-go cup and hustling out the door – what is your potential and what will you do today?

A few weeks ago, I was in Plattsburgh, New York, walking down the sidewalk with my 8-year-old niece. It was very quiet and still when she said plainly into the midday heat: “There are so many different ways we could live.”

Her statement made me smile. Yes of course.

“You have the mind of a writer,” I told her to which she walked a little taller suddenly.

But there’s only so much thoughtful information you can tell a child before they shut you off.  Only so much I can tell her about how I think about that exact same thing every time I see a tired mother driving and smoking with her kid in the passenger seat, when I see a bent old man feeding pigeons in a park, or when I see two friends saying goodbye at the train station. Where are we all going? Where have we all been? We have all walked so many miles.

Pointing at a spooky old Victorian up for sale I asked: “What if you lived there? What would your life be like?”

She squinted in the midday sun looking at the house. Its drooping front wrap porch, its stained glass windows covered in ivy, a cat jumping out of a nearby bush…

She shrugged and said “Probably pretty scary.” If I was 8, I might say that too.

But flip that idea and imagine the loving family that could have once lived there, mothers knitting with their daughters on the well cared for porch, the brothers sitting on the stoop talking to them, the father pulling in the driveway to a hot supper. At one time that house could have been filled with all the warmth and love any of us could ever dream of.

Could it be that one day, it was too hard to manage the house? The children grew older and went away, the husband passed, the wife, a widow, went to live in a smaller space so as not to have to tend so much? Alone the house sat until the very moment where we stood there staring, as if waiting for someone to come outside with wet hair and a coffee to-go.

It wasn’t really that it was scary, it’s that it wasn’t tended to. The door covered in spider webs, waiting for opportunity to wake up.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: TheDarkThing

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I was brought up Catholic by two parents born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The seaside city is still dotted with my French Canadian relatives who must still believe that religious statues bleed and cry when we sin and masturbate.

If you go today to the Sacred Heart cemetery there, you will see plots marked with the DuFault, D’Avignon, Kerouac and Lauzon names marking territory where once both sides of the family flourished, but now, the cemetery is the most populated place to find us.

A main focal point as you drive through the city on I-195 is St. Anthony’s church, a soot covered, neglected cathedral you might see the likes of in Europe, (but taken care of). This is the place where my mother went to school her whole life and where as a child, I would sit at Sunday French mass en route to my memere and pepere’s house. I was very religious at that time and would be dizzied from the thick incense and stained glass windows, the chants in French and the organ player’s sonorous bass that would rattle my ribs. God was for sure watching. I was freaking scared.

“Seigneur, écoute notre prière,” over and over we would chant in hopes that the lord would of course hear the communal prayers of desperation, of desires to have better jobs, of hopes that this wasn’t all there was, and that life everlasting was a much better place than the shithole we were all festering in, albeit laced with some really great smelling Frankincense.

As I grew older and sinned a lot more, confessions dictated lots of Hail Marys. There on my knees, staring up at Jesus on the cross, I would recite the prayer, 5, 10, 20 times, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee…” as if some fictitious woman would suddenly descend from the heavens and save me from stealing, swearing and masturbating like a one armed bandit.

I slept with rosaries on my bed post to ward off devils, vampires and my older brother’s friends who tried to make out with me in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. I prayed to The Virgin to uphold all the truths I was trying so hard to manage as a good, upstanding young woman and still nothing.

It wasn’t until I was about 18 that I realized, in life, WE are the Hail Mary and the Our Father and the Glory Be that will save us from the bad choices we make and the world we choose to create for ourselves. Thanks to the atheist friends who baptized me that 18th summer talking incessantly about life and freedom as we beat on drums and sang in wooded cathedrals.

A good friend mentioned in conversation the other day “this might be the Hail Mary we need.”

I laughed pretty hard when he said it and though I knew what it meant, I still looked it up for a proper definition:

“A Hail Mary pass or Hail Mary route in American football refers to any very long forward pass made in desperation with only a small chance of success, especially at or near the end of a half.”

For this referenced Hail Mary, there are no Woolworth’s rainbow headbands or Wet & Wild neon polishes to steal anymore. I swear like a truck driver still and those friends of my older brother? I would kick their balding, overweight asses the minute they puckered up. This Hail Mary, oh this one just might be calling on all things holy to help.

But one has to wonder where all the incense is, where the weathered relative’s faces are chanting like monks beside me, hoping and wishing, praying that pass will be the touchdown, that the Virgin Mary will open her statue eyes and say “You’ve done it. See, prayer works.”

Sometimes, it’s just the facts. It’s all about timing and money and how much you’ve got in you to weather a moral, ethical and physical hellstorm.

C.S. Lewis was quoted as saying: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

Sometimes I feel like that Mary statue, my arms open as I wait at the end of the field trying to scream with my mouth set in stone.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: vchili

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was 19, living in Italy and then backpacking Europe, I re-entered my life back here in the States with a whole new perspective on what I would want from the future. Oh, I could envision this virgin bucket list and sitting here writing this – at this very moment – I can tell you I remember what I FELT like when I saw the future and it had very little to do with being responsible.

(Bucket List 1990): To remain forever single, forever childless, to explore jungles clad in dirty tank tops and a camera around my neck shooting images of wild eyed women who have no idea why the hell I would want to be there, write a novel alone in a cabin on a mountain, learn how to fly a Cessna, have many affairs, romances, always take coffee with lots of cream, explore existential freedom, sexual freedom, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2000): To love my husband forever, to take my two children to all the places that inspired me, to inspire at least 10 women to succeed, to buy a cottage on a lake, buy a 1963 Ford Falcon to look cool in, drive in New York City without having an anxiety attack, go on a roller coaster again, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2010): Breathe more, take yoga weekly, take my two children to all the places that inspired me, inspire another 10 women to succeed, get that damn cottage on a lake, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic (because for shit’s sake I know enough people who work there now).

(Bucket List 2012):

I had this column all mapped out for you. I was going to be clever but truthful and write a few things here about what is REALLY on my current bucket list. But as with life, and all the twists and turns it offers us, I stumbled upon an article in the daily newspaper early this morning.

A former philosophy professor who is forever my mentor and friend had written his own column with the title “A New Kind of Clock Tells the Truth.”

“Here are three things that we all know to be true,” he writes.

“1. The past does not exist.

2. The future does not exist.

3. All that does exist is the present.”

I often tell my 92 year old neighbor when she laughs and tells me I’ll “probably outlive her,” that in this life, we cannot always be so certain. I told her just last night on her back porch that at that very moment a satellite from space could suddenly plunge from on high and crush me right in front of her. She didn’t think that was so funny and went inside.

Bucket lists? To what purpose do they serve? To add to longings and make us feel inadequate with what we do have? I have everything I need at this very moment: a comfortable chair, a cold glass of lemon water, a light breeze on my shoulders and an audience who will read this article.

My family is safe and healthy and we have traveled. I have taken flying lessons, listened to countless women’s dreams, driven in New York City, rode roller coasters, taken yoga classes and sat quietly taking deep breaths.

I disagree a bit with my professor. I say the past does exist and that it has a big part of the present. That in the grand scheme of things, these experiences are all things that have made us who we are sitting here together. We have not only checked things off the list but we are the total of them. Regardless of whether they’ve been right or wrong, we are them.

How full we should be now and ready for the falling satellites.

Image: Naomi Lbuki

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: Rethinking the Bucket List appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

It could have been when I listened to Nick Hahn, former CEO and co-founder of Cotton, Inc., a keynote speaker at a recent sustainable fashion event at FIT. It might have been when he told the audience that Monsanto may have made his company better and that the use of organic cotton wasn’t all that favorable. After all, regular cotton uses less water and with the impending water crisis well…we all have to pick our battles.

I had to determine which statement was more absurd. I looked around at the women I was surrounded by which included Ecouterre Managing Editor, Jasmin Malik Chua, EcoSalon writers Jessica Marati and Jennifer Barckley, Greta Eagan of GretaGuide, Rona Berg, Editor-in-Chief of Organic Spa magazine, representatives from Eileen Fisher, sustainability professors from FIT, Parsons and Pratt, not to mention a bevy of sustainable designers and fabric suppliers and I cringed.

Who could he be trying to sell his idea too and did he really think this platform was the proper place? We muttered under our breaths “What about the pesticides?,” “What about contaminating the water?,” and most popular, “What a bunch of horseshit.”

Still, people were listening and he might have planted his own genetically modified seed into the brains of some of the audience there. Later in the day, watching him sleepily nodding off in a corner, head on his chest, I had to ask myself again, who are these people running the show?

The next day I literally ran from a breakfast with the Eileen Fisher sustainability team – where we’d just talked about how eco fashion is very political – to meet Erica Wolf of Save the Garment Center who is also designer Nanette Lepore’s assistant.

“I am so slammed,” she said over the phone as I picked up my pace nearing Midtown. “Have you heard what’s going on?”

“Nope. What have I missed?”

By the time I pushed the elevator button to bring me up to Nanette Lepore’s 5th floor studio, I had already passed ABC News outside on the street. Sweat covered and trying to fix myself in the elevator, I was greeted by a Fox News camera man and reporter who were just leaving the studio.

“Sit down there,” Erica whispered pointing to a corner chair and covering the phone.

Here is where I learned of the Olympic uniforms being made in China. As a major supporter of Save the Garment Center, Lepore was on tap to tell the world just how possible it would have been to make that entire uniform in the U.S. After all, it’s the American team so why wouldn’t Ralph Lauren have thought of maybe just this once, taking his American inspirational brand and made it, well, truly American not faux American?

Still, there’s an issue that looms large and it’s this: why now. Why do so many Americans care about U.S. made clothing now? Because it’s the Olympics? Because it’s election year? What about all the other weeks of the year when U.S. consumers are shopping China-cheap buys at Walmart, Forever21 and H&M stores nationwide? Do YOU ever flip the label to see where your clothes are from? Let’s not get all righteous now unless we want to keep walking the talk.

With the Olympics starting in just 10 days, the entire Olympic committee, the athletes, and the entire United States of America now need to get their minds off of why weren’t those tacky Lauren-logo-emblazoned uniforms made here (really? That polo logo passed the committee?) and start backing all the athletes looking for a shot at their personal best. Those men and women waiting for their chance at a glory they have been waiting for since they were little kids swimming in public pools and racing their friends up and down the street.

“I’m so upset. I think the Olympic Committee should be ashamed of themselves,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Fox News reporters when asked about an ABC News report on the origin of the Ralph Lauren-designed uniforms.

“I think they should take all the uniforms, put them in a big pile and burn them,” Reid added.

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: It’s Election Year, Do You Know Where Your Clothes Are From? appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

It should never be all that surprising when idiocy takes hold of a culture. We allow it to with every right we give up, every piece of fast fashion we purchase, every texted bastardization of the English language (YOLO!) and every time we wait in line at a Dunkin Donuts drive-thru too lazy to get out of our SUVs. It’s almost like we want mediocrity, a simplicity that makes life easier to understand in all its watered down glory. I like to call it the Dick and Jane complex and its tendrils are many and sticky.

Part minimalism and part some world-wide need to emulate everyone else, we’ve all started giving up our freedoms to express our Selves in cluttered forms. Clean lines equal the future we’ve seen in countless science fiction movies where we, clad in metallic unitards, hovercraft into our concrete living bunkers (designed of course by the newest breakthrough architect), are but cogs in some life machine recharging what little spirit we have left to give. Eat. Sex. Sleep. Work. We might want to ask ourselves if life has spun that far out of control that we need such cleanliness and structured rigor to feel in control.

Run Jane run.

Germs multiply even though we try and sanitize them from our existence. We see popular online venues, sites we’ve come to love and treasure turn to profit only pulling “community led” content to homogenize the information we greedily gobble daily. Those big men in high places have nailed the social media formula and given us clear Kool-Aid in plastic water bottles that we drink and suck from like pigs at the teet.

We don’t want anything to get old and tattered so we buy new at rock bottom prices at blockbuster sales. We lust after the smell of clean store, fresh plastic and strong cleaners to rid ourselves of the fact that we are a dirty species capable of dirty things. Of menacing things that are dark and never a shade of white. We don’t want to stray anymore because it’s so dangerous. Always staying within the lines. It’s Groundhog Day for the minimalist, for the budget price buster and for Jane. Nietzsche is laughing his ass off at us from the grave.

Live Jane live.

Mother Jones recently reported that “Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans.” Instead of sitting around campfires and in quiet places where we can have wild discussions of “I always wanted to…” or “next on my bucket list is…,” we are turning more towards our computers and bosses, entities that validate we are here because they greet us daily and we are told what to do. It’s all about purpose. Those bosses don’t want our opinions so much anymore. Our computers connect us to friends and family all over the world that no longer write us messy, handwritten letters or even call because it would take too long and time is money.

Feel Jane feel.

The past few weeks I have been scraping and priming and painting my home. Paint chips are everywhere and my arms ache at night from using them in ways they are not used to. I flop down in bed next to my husband who is just as tired and we laugh about the pain. All day long we are talking as we work making our mess, fixing the dry rot, missing some spots with paint and letting go the thought that we will finish the entire house anytime soon. It will surely take us all summer because of our hectic lives. It will give my husband and I more time to get to know each other again. Hear each other breathing as we work.

Love Jane love.

I sometimes imagine longer sentences in Jane’s books detailing her life. Some words are misspelled and are hard to understand. Jane isn’t always playing with friends but sits alone under trees sometimes to contemplate her life. Jane takes off her shoes and dirties her feet in the grass. She empties her pockets full of dried flowers. Jane picks up a stubby pencil and writes a poem. It is an ode to everything she knows is rich and wonderful and present in her life. Jane is me. Jane is you.

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: Evolving Into Dick and Jane appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

A friend commented on a recent column I wrote, saying, “The last time I went to hear a band in Boston, I realized I’d become the creepy older guy in the back of the room.”

“Creepy?” I asked him. “We’ve become creepy?”

Christ.

A few weeks ago I hit an indie music shop and instead of plopping down a dogeared album or a new band’s CD, I – completely embarrassed – laid down The Essential Simon & Garfunkel.

“Please, don’t say anything,” I said to the earlobe-gauged-20-something year old behind the counter. “I just like a few songs on this.”

“Hey,” he said from his perch looking down at me, “S&G have street cred!”

“Hmmmm….yes, they do,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “And staying power, too.”

Driving home from a meeting the following weekend, I called the only foodie I really know to tell her about my dinner.

“Oven fired pizza with local cheeses and veggies, and, don’t laugh at me, a beet, goat cheese, and spinach salad,” I said over her immediate laughter. But it tasted good regardless, I thought. And Simon and Garfunkel are still in music stores and I am still going to hear new bands – so have I really lost my edge?

I tried explaining it to my father.

“Edge?” He shouted, exasperated. “How do you ‘lose your edge?'”

I rubbed the rounded side of the dinner table. “Like this…not with an edge, dull, old hat.” He still didn’t get it. It was like I was speaking in a foreign tongue.

When is it we get to that point in our lives where we have the sudden (hard) realization that we are just that much older and not as cool? I’m not talking about saying words like gasoline, Sears & Roebuck and slacks, but that we just don’t have all the “right” words at just the right moment. We dance like we remember Uncle Don did at all those family weddings – freely but still, uncomfortably. When we go out with our closest friends who are a decade younger, people ask, “Is that your daughter?”

All those same, younger girlfriends see you as a “mentor,” someone with “so much experience” they can learn from, which is strange. You thought, the reason they wanted to hang out was because you were fun, not because you had anything to offer.

Walking through Midtown New York City a few Sundays ago en route to judge a handbag contest, I mused on all the times I’d walked alone in the city and how it never gets old. Being alone in a city, the possibilities are endless to just fade away and be someone else. It brings to mind a quote permanently tattooed in my head by British explorer and travel writer Freya Stark who once said: “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

Pleasant and full of anonymity.

I use enough expensive organic beauty products to look younger than I am, so who knows I’m not one of those edgy friends 10 years my junior? Especially with sunglasses on. Who is really to know I like listening to Simon & Garfunkel and eat goat cheese and beet salads? For all they know, I’m “that badass chic in that band, you know the one, that’s her isn’t it?”

If we are to define what this edginess means – if we even care at all – then I’m going to have to go with the line of thought that says what is cool is what is not.

There’s always going to be band I know and have hung out on a tour bus with that earlobe dude has not, there’s always going to be that food I ate with the Bedouins in Africa that my friend hasn’t (yet), and of course there’s the fact that I’m not creepy. Never will be. Unless I try being something I’m not.

And that CD with Art Garfunkel sporting a blonde afro? If I told you it reminded me of driving through the canyons in New Mexico with wrapped sage on my dash and carved animal totems, that it reminds me of some of the sweetest moments of my life adventuring alone with my dad’s old camera to take pictures of cliff dwellings and ruins, then maybe I’ve just convinced myself that getting older doesn’t make you creepy at all – it just makes you edgier from all the experience.

Image: Psylight

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Coming home on a ferry Sunday from Martha’s Vineyard, I pulled out my iPhone and checked emails.

I should have waited until Monday.

A close friend emailed me she’d had the most bizarre weekend ever: running over a stray dildo in a bike lane, a homeless man telling her she’d “dropped her smile” while he pointed at the ground and finally, seeing a guy she’d dated on Match.com while running a half marathon. Thanks to seeing him she’d improved her time trying to run away. There was that.

Another friend had come to the conclusion she was a farmer and a designer and a mother and a whole host of things – wasn’t she? Shouldn’t she be a bee-keeper too?

And what about the straight friend who emailed me early Sunday morning that sure, she’d had a few glasses of wine but, it was for sure, she’d asked a woman out on a date and was planning on following through.

Friends looking for jobs, love, new meaning to life and a restlessness unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time.

What was my status? I’d bought a pin for my jacket on Martha’s Vineyard that read: “The voices in my head don’t like you.”

The cheery driver of our island shuttle bus shouted over the shrill noise coming from a crack in the windshield, “Mercury is in Retrograde until Wednesday!”

Another sign. Later Sunday evening at a concert in Boston, it suddenly occurred to me I was tired of being pushed by hipsters trying to channel David Bowie, who thought they should be closer to the stage than I. So, I decided not to move. To block them from passing as if a backlit Gandalf with staff.

“Is this chick drunk?” I heard one guy say to his female companion.

“No,” I said, turning around, backlit, defiantly staring into his face. “I am not drunk, you asshole, I want to hear the band!”

My husband suggested we move and pulled me by the arm.

Over the years, I’ve had many friends utter the phrase when all seems off in the world, but not until maybe the past two years have I considered planetary disruptions as part of some unsolvable life riddle. That maybe the New Agers I grew up with were right and I should be layering myself in crystals and burning Nag Champa, tattooing prophecies on my arms, reading The Farmer’s Almanac more diligently and meditating on my world energy as armor against planetary strife.

Just so we’re clear here, according to astrally-correct Cafeastrology.com, three, and sometimes four times a year, the planet Mercury does freak out a bit, and appears to be moving backwards in the sky for a period of approximately three weeks. The planet “appears” to do this “simply because the Earth is also orbiting the Sun at a different speed than the other planets.”

The site says thanks to Mercury’s “rulership over such things as speaking, negotiating, buying and selling, listening, formal contracts, documents, travel, the mail and shipping, and so forth,” delays and challenges are more probable with Mercury retrograde.

Which means, three to four times a year, get in fetal position in your closet and hunker down with some bread and water or, do like William Eadon in his vibrant crystal corner.

Continuing on with our investigation, what happens when the full moon is coming right behind Mercury in retrograde, as it is this week? Shouldn’t we all band together and do something like plant a super crop at midnight, weave a magic eco fabric, or build a green home without a plan? I mean, if confusion mixed with peyote-powerful inclinations to challenge and question authority is upon us, maybe there are some inner revelations we could vibrate as a group. We could start a new movement. We would have to tape it, of course, to prove this all happened; certainly there would be some “Oh no you didn’t!” moments but still…we could, at the very least, howl really loud together.

I say we do it.

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: Sweetie187, Williams Crystal Corner, A Selby Film. from the selby on Vimeo.

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Poet Mary Oliver took on hero status for me when I was 24, living in Portland, Oregon, and in the only “bad” relationship I have ever had. What always comes as a complete surprise to me is that I was introduced to the poet through him. He was a law student at Lewis & Clark College, constantly embroiled with cause and effect. “Dude,” as we’ll call him, always found solace in the creative words of others, and Oliver was, for him, a spiritual release. I wanted to hate her. Everything about her. All because of him. Instead I found myself toting copies of her collections around like the bible.

After two years, Dude found a job interning at a law firm far away from Portland, the relationship finally ended. Oh, the poems that shot from my fingertips. The ramblings and rumblings of my aching heart, the anger at wasting time and the deliberate assumption that, with Mary Oliver as my guide, I was going to get better. I did. In fact, my very first published poem was an ode to her entitled “Bullfrog.” It rests beside me as I type. I am still proud of it, no matter what it lacks.

Years later, leaving the city of Portland in a U-Haul with a husband and seven-month-old boy in tow, we three watched the miles tick away between here and there, as we made the move to Cape Cod, where I was born and raised. If you know anything about the poet Mary Oliver, you will know she lives here on Cape Cod in the artist colony of Provincetown.

There were always opportunities to hear her read, but nothing ever worked out until one night, my friend Rachel called and said, “She’s reading this weekend, you know.”

That Saturday, we set out blazing in Rachel’s Porsche for the Outer Lands, to the tip of the Cape, which resembles the moon. Sand dunes line the small highway, kettle ponds dot the landscape and scrub pines, shaped by the wind, stand like warriors to time. All day I imagined this meeting, this reading. I’d printed out a copy of my poem and folded it neatly into an envelope ready to hand it to her. So consumed was I by this evening reading I could barely stay present with my dear friend, whom I see little of for all her traveling and living in New York.

The day had been humid and sunny. A sunglasses-sticking-to-the-bridge-of-your-nose kind of hot and yet, over dinner, the sky opened up to downpours of cool rain. Making a run for the old church where the reading was to be, we walked in, drenched, to a standing-room-only crowd. Rachel scanned the room, grabbed my hand and led me to the front, where we squeezed ourselves in between two women who pressed away from us, disgusted.

As Mary Oliver walked into the room, my eyes filled with tears and I clenched my envelope. She spoke, people oohed. She spoke, people laughed. She spoke and people sat in silence. She spoke and I could only think could I get an interview? There was her publisher, over there in the corner. I’d hit her up first.

And then everyone was standing and clapping and hollering her name and I realized the time had gone by fast (not fast enough, though) and people were lining up to shake her hand and say something nice. My friend pushed me out and we waited in line. I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I should.

“Miss Oliver,” I said, “I wrote this poem for you…it was my first published poem – here,” I said handing it to her damp from rain.

“And I would love to interview you sometime,” I smiled, feeling more confident.

Mary Oliver’s smile turned to a frown.

“I don’t do interviews,” she said, shaking her head.

Devastated, I followed the crowd into the book signing room. My friend had already tried to help get the publisher on board to help, to no avail.

“I’m so sorry,” I heard her say. “She just doesn’t do interviews.”

Rachel and I stood in the church doorway after, gauging how wet we were (again) about to get. She grabbed my hand and we ran out. I was grateful for the rain to hide my tears and even though I rarely use the word, my shame.

The thing we have to realize about this life is that there are endless opportunities. Sometimes they knock so hard, screaming for us to hear. Battling the wind, the rain and the clamor of daily routine, they shout for us to pay attention. They beg us to be quiet and accept.

Like the bullfrog.

Bullfrog
(For Mary Oliver)
1995

I saw her there,
heard her melodic croaking
in the throat
of the Bullfrog –
Thick and mournful.
I was young then.

With her body hobbled,
bunched up,
I took advantage and pushed
the jar over her
twisting it,
watching the thick, grey
mucus from her back
stripe the inside of the glass.
“How beautiful you are!” I shouted.
She,
only able to move her eyes
lowered them,
sunset,
moonrise,
then a shaking,
like dad’s Ford,
February in all its splendor-
I knew that something strange was happening
that nothing
more strange could happen.

This time it’s me.

A lecture hall,
talk of meiosis, mitosis,
a double helix unzipping
separating,
like cool river water over
a stray stone.

I hear her again.
Her croaks ascend into something
so tangible-
I fight to breathe,
struggle to listen,
knowing my life depends
on her entirely.

-Amy DuFault

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: vincepal

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