What's Been Going On?

An update as to my whereabouts.
Reposted from my newsletter (subscribe).
 

The last workshop I held was called "Multiculturalism as Poetic Mosaic" at the Billie Jean King Long Beach Public Library for the Youth Poet Laureate Program in December. Before that, I hosted a free 6-week writing workshop called "Poetry for Self-Expression" in partnership with Angels Gate Cultural Center as a part of my year-long Artists at Work residency—all the way back in the summer!

2022 was actually a difficult year for me, so I was not as active in community leadership as usual. As we all know, writing is a reflection of life, and life must be lived in order to have anything to write about. I was so fortunate to have the financial support of the Artists at Work residency because it allowed me a year of rest. Since I discovered the poetry community in 2013, I have been excessively active in writing, teaching, hosting (often for free) and trying to make a life in the arts. I like to say I spent 10 years in hustle mode, so I deserved a year of rest. Not to mention, because of my personal circumstances, I have been in survival mode since I was a child.

So, finally, I had downtime to reflect, consider, and mostly just be. I had to un-learn the belief that my value was predicated on my productivity (thanks, Capitalism!). In fact, I didn't write much. What did I do all year? Of course I was fulfilling my duties as an Artist at Work and did some really fun programming with them, including teaching poetry to kids after school and running Poems & Produce in the Wilmington community garden. I had my book accepted for publication so I worked on that.

But outside of that, I think I mostly just took walks, meditated, and spiraled into existential boredom. I read recently that existential boredom is necessary for the creative impulse to strike, and boy did I go deep into existential reflection. I was questioning my purpose and meaning in life, not to mention the severe planetary crises facing us now. "Crisis as normal" you could say. How do we live with all of that? How do we hold crisis and hope at the same time? Was the human race really doomed, bringing down so many other species with us? These questions (as the topics of my book as well) plagued me. I had to determine where I stood in the face of all of it. What was I willing to believe, what was I willing to sacrifice, what was I willing to change, what was I willing to do in service to the web of life?

It also seemed like whatever I tried to begin ended up not working out. I almost started hosting a poetry open mic, but that didn't pan out for me. I started working on a family history project, but the second recording of an interview with my father didn't save! I was writing but not interested in anything I was writing. I followed the signs and just let myself give away all pre-conceived notions of what my life was supposed to be. I grieved all that was lost during the pandemic, emotions that perhaps I had suppressed while I was actively in survival and stress mode (who wasn't??). Not to mention, I was experimenting with new medication for my mental health and fighting through some severe depression. I attended many healing workshops online and I just kept getting through each day, grateful for the support of my spiritual community, family, partner, patrons, and friends.

I ended up being a part of a wonderful project called Behind the Mask, which brought together artists of various disciplines to write short scenes for the stage and then we performed our original pieces to a live audience! That really helped shake me out of my malaise. Then, I started painting. And riding my bike. I returned to bellydance class. Started cooking more. Rekindled some friendships. Started going to the Unitarian Universalist church! Started attending more online workshops as a student. Started drawing. Dabbled in fiction. And I took on a leadership role as the Hub Coordinator for the Sunrise Movement in Long Beach, a youth-led climate organization.

I was missing community, and I had to find it again. I was bored of poetry and had to find other ways of expressing myself. I had to seek out new avenues of fulfillment in my life. I am reminded again that the life of an artist takes many winding turns. I never really know what the next step will be, what I will be drawn towards, what new directions life has in store for me. I operate as a servant to my callings, and in 2022, I had to let go of all notions of who I was in the past in order to step into who I was becoming.

(Regarding environmentalism, I am changing constantly. I had to fight past the resistance to change! As a household, we are taking alternative modes of transportation like walking, biking, and busing rather than driving, we have a garden and a compost system, we eat way less meat, and we are now trying to get into the habit of buying products that are more sustainably produced, not to mention as an organization, Sunrise Long Beach is determined to get Long Beach to quit oil production.)

What does this mean for Surprise the Line? To be honest, I'm not sure. My interests are aligning around eco-poetry and solarpunk. In fact, I'll be teaching a workshop with CSU Channel Islands in April on solarpunk, the literary genre that imagines a future where humans, technology, and nature exist in harmony. If it goes well, I might be able to replicate it.

But the honest truth is that as much as I love running Surprise the Line and I love offering free and donation-based workshops, it is so much work on my own for not enough money. That's the real truth. If I wanted to really grow it out into a full-fledged organization, I would need lots of time, dedication, commitment, consistency, and a team. Just look at what The Poetry Lab and The Poetry Salon are doing! I know what kind of resources they put into their business, and I'm not sure that I'm fully committed to leading that level of expansion. So I am keeping Surprise the Line open as an avenue for me to teach classes and workshops when inspiration strikes.

Right now, I am being called deeper into climate activism and toward my own writing and art projects. That doesn't mean I won't ever host another workshop, but I've decided I can't run Surprise the Line as a full business, more of a side project that is personally interesting to me and not about making money. That feels good and right. I see poetry as a spiritual endeavor anyway, so I would like to keep my offerings free or donation-based. I don't want to transition into a paid business model. There is plenty of that already out there. There are TONS of literary organizations that offer classes, and of course the MFA.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! I feel a deep love and loyalty to everyone who has been with me either on my personal writing journey or as a part of the Surprise the Line community. Do we ever really know what life is going to do next? I'm in a state of open, curious discovery.

Much love,
Nancy

Part of the Solution

I’ve been worried about global warming since I was eight years old. I don’t remember how I learned about it, maybe television or school, but I’ve been keenly aware of global systems since I essentially became sentient. Behind everything, I see the systems working, and I’ve always felt at odds with the fluorescent supermarket. There was something unnatural about the world I grew up in. I sensed it but I couldn’t name it. Not until later.

It was white supremacy.

As a general ruling principle.

I grew up in Huntington Beach, California, which boasted the Nazi rallies in 2016.

White supremacy is a faulty dualistic paradigm that pits White People against Everyone Else. That’s why white people were able to engage in such brutal enslavement and genocide of Africans and Native Americans. White people created a false separation between themselves and those they exploited. It’s similar to how we call animals “it” so we don’t think of them as living beings.

And it’s all related: my sneaking suspicion that “something wasn’t right here” all throughout childhood. There was a clear distinction between the white people, who were the majority, and the rest of us. While my mother is white, I occupy a space of ethnic ambiguity, as many mixed-race kids do. So I was surrounded by white people, but I didn’t look like them.

I didn’t like the gaudiness of South Coast Plaza, a massive indoor shopping arena. I fantasized about living on a ranch. I always had this strange sense like something was missing.

That something was my connection to nature.

White supremacy creates the duality of “me vs. them,” where “them” is the non-white population of the global world. Nature is also included in the category of expendable. Therefore, it’s not in white supremacy’s range to feel empathy for fellow humans, animals, and ecosystems. It’s all expendable.

The me/them split mirrors the society/nature split. White supremacy, capitalism, and ecological destruction all go hand in hand.

So fighting one is fighting the other.

I’d like to think democracy works. I’m getting more involved in environmental stewardship in the form of political organizing, and decided that I’d rather spend my life working to be part of the solution than living in chosen denial.

That’s the underpinning to my forthcoming collection, I’d Rather Be Lightning. I don’t say it directly, of course, but I’d rather know the despair that is possible and choose hope anyway.

That is the paradigm I choose to live in. Hopepunk.

I’m immersed in news and media about the approaching/current ecological crisis because I can’t un-know what I know. We saw how fragile and unprepared our systems were for the COVID-19 pandemic. Human activity is putting so much pressure on so many of the world’s natural systems that scientists think we might have around a decade left, if that, to drastically reduce the output of global carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to prevent serious, irreversible disasters that cannot be undone and could be civilization-ending events. We are approaching or have surpassed so many tipping points, such as biodiversity loss and desertification, that we as a society need to be thinking about how to make rapid changes in society. I mean, rapid. I mean, we need to move so fast and so clearly and so in alignment with each other.

I don’t believe there is any more important issue than this, and every aspect of society needs to realign with the parameters set out by the boundaries of our natural systems. That means we need to shift a culture of consumerism and competition to a culture of community and sustainability.

I think everyone has a role to play. I personally feel a spiritual calling towards writing and organizing. Others are botanists or farmers or arts leaders or visionary entrepreneurs or healers or teachers. We are all connected in the web of life, and it’s Western dualism that separates humans and nature so that it cannot see the obvious link between Antarctic ice sheets and the fragility of human life without the perfect condition of the Holocene. It does require a little bit of science, but basic science, to understand , for example, how melting peat bogs release methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which contributes to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes global warming. And the warming that is already occurring is meting the ice caps, which means less reflective area to bounce back the sun’s rays, which means more warming.

One of the problems is that climate change is such a complex issue that it’s difficult to talk about. People don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to think about it. We don’t even know how to talk about it because it’s either too depressing or too difficult. And many that I know have adopted an attitude of “fuck it,” which essentially equates to: We’re all gonna die so might as well live it up now! There’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway.

But I’m not resigned. What we need is people power and mass organizing to change the politics and the culture, which will be absolutely necessary if the human race is to survive. We need to work together, not in a dualistic framework of “us vs. them,” but in a holistic understanding that we are all in this boat together, and I’m worried for all of us. I have a biased attachment to humanity and would prefer that we don’t destroy ourselves.

Adapt or die. That is what the most brilliant scientists have been yelling at us now for decades. I think it’s time we listen.

We Finally Weeded the Yard and This Is What We Found

We cleaned out the yard last weekend. And built an enclosure for the compost pile.

My partner and I rent a house with a front yard, so during the height of quarantine, we built a garden bed and started planting. For a while it was glorious! It was all tomatoes and cucumbers and onions and peppers all the time!

Then, after a year and a half or so, I let the garden die. I lost the motivation to turn the bed and keep replanting. Some interior personal issues were rising to the surface that needed my attention. I went into a long winter.

Around that same time, Kurt, whose responsibility between us was to water and mow the lawn, decided that he was done. We have a manual lawn mower, which makes it a pain, and also California is in a severe drought, so why are we watering a lawn? He just stopped, and the grass turned from green to yellow.

So it became a dry chaparral wasteland out there.

We didn’t do anything about it for a very long time.

I think we had to experience what it was like to let the plant life die. We got to watch the lush grass die and be replaced by whatever resilient desert species cropped up in their place.

And finally, last weekend we weeded the whole thing out.

(It wasn’t even that much work. It was enjoyable. I love getting my hands in the dirt. I need to unplug from the Internet and from my overactive mind sometimes, and getting physical with Mother Earth usually does the trick.)

As we were weeding, I was identifying the wild plants that had started growing. There were tall bristly stalks, short little white flowers, dandelions, a striking orange Treasure Flower, tropical milkweed, some amaranth, and a handful of native plants. We took out all the exotic or invasive species and kept the natives.

Here are the native plants we found growing in our front yard! (I used the app Picture This for identification.)

• Hairy fleabane

• Spiny amaranth

• Tall flatsedge

• Creeping woodsorrel

Here are the invasive species we found:

• Tropical milkweed

• Bristly oxtongue

Unfortunately, after all that naturalist activity, our landlord came by a few days later, possibly inspired by our efforts, and pulled out the rest of the natives as he was trimming up what we started. The good news is he fixed the low front fence that had been missing spikes since we moved in three years ago. The bad news is he killed all the plants we were saving!.

I wonder if that scenario is the Broken Window Theory in action. The theory states that if there is one dysfunctional piece in a system, like a broken window in a neighborhood that no one fixes, it encourages more derelict behavior, and eventually the neighborhood breaks down. Was it because our landlord never fixed the fence that we let our yard meet that level of decay? Was it because we cleaned it up that he also did?

I think that’s part of it. Another part is that with the state of drought in California, it doesn’t quite make sense to keep watering a lawn in a desert. We want desert landscaping with native plants. We want to live in harmony with the natural environment around us, rather than waste precious fresh water that is needed elsewhere, like on the farms.

We don’t need a lawn. We can go to a park for fresh grass.

So we planted a couple of succulents and I’m planning on planting a new vegetable garden soon. (If we’re going to use water in the yard, it’s better to grow food.)

So, the yard doesn’t look great now, but it’s better than it was before.

Sometimes, transitions can be ugly.

I keep this in mind when I think about the transition the world is making from dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy. So much needs to shift in the next ten years, and much more quickly than it has been, to avoid the worst of climate change. Some of it might be ugly. Some of it already has been.

Climate change enters every aspect of our lives. We are citizens living and using resources in the country responsible for nearly a quarter of the entire world’s emissions.

I get to enjoy the benefits of living in a wealthy, modernized, democratic Western country. And I also know that that wealth has been built on the backs of the global South over the past 500 years of colonialism, where the toll of a changing global ecosystem will be greatest.

So weeding the yard is like clearing out the old systems to make room for the new.

Even though it’s easier to put it off, eventually, the weeding needs to happen.

And the best I can do is work on changing myself, embracing the uncertainty of the rapidly shifting future.

It’s time to make lots of changes.

There’s a lot of us out there transitioning to a greener world. We need to. It’s mandatory. It’s crucial that we transition to a sustainable way of life. No more plastic one-time use cutlery.

No more environmental destruction.

No more watering lawns when we need water to irrigate crops.

So our once-green lawn has reverted back to its natural form in the landscape: chaparral. Maybe, just maybe, we can restore a little bit of the native land here and do our part to live our values and be part of the solution. There are too many problems in the world not to try and make things better in whatever way we can. Even if that means letting our lawn die and bearing with the ugliness until we reach the other side.

In Service of the Work

I have a Post-It above my desk that reads:

I am CENTERED BY the work. Doing the work CENTERS me!

I am driven by my work. Whatever my work is.

Truthfully, I dislike promoting myself. But I believe in the work.

Writing poetry is about connecting on a deeper level, and I write to connect. To give someone something to connect to.

Poetry is neurodivergent. It thinks in a different way.

I was reading poems at a park yesterday, invited by the endlessly gracious Alyssandra Nighswonger, and I was the poet in between bands. What a privilege. What a delight. What an honor.

At one point, I told the audience I liked to have fun with my poems. And I do.

Someone afterwards said they liked hearing the language play. Poetry is language playing. It can be about serious topics, but my favorite poems are the ones that horse around with syntax and shit. Voice.

So when I get sick of myself, as I often do, because the auxiliary aspects of writing are not always thrilling, and sometimes I feel like it is too self-centered to have a career as a poet, I remind myself that I am doing it in service of the work.

Sometimes, it feels like something other than me is writing. Something wiser, truer, and even funnier. My higher self coming through.

It’s something that’s always been there. A drive to write. A compulsion in me to chew on language. (And it’s better if it’s fun.)

Poetry thinks in a different way. It opens us.

If I’m in service to the work, I want my work to be in service of the world.

So, in a roundabout way, I tell myself, maybe my poems will mean something to someone out there who I will never meet, as many poems have changed me. So, then, my work is to heal, write, and act.

We all have our work. I was at a political candidate forum last night, and I could see every person on that stage was doing their work. Their calling. Aspiring assembly members, city council members, and mayors. Even though I may be skeptical of politicians’ true motives, some of them seem so genuine that I couldn’t help but feel inspired by their calling. I could see their drive to make a difference, make an impact, and be of service. Why else would anyone want to work that hard? They’re tireless, campaigning and campaigning.

Their drive to service and my drive to service may look different, but I recognize the path of service.

My service is to spread poetic wisdom and delight. To keep the channel of creativity open. To shine a light upon the tool of writing as a way through the darkness.

Even when down in the darkest depths, poetry has always been there for me. Poetry, in a way, is my higher power. A higher power, I should say. I think I have many higher powers. Writing certainly comes from a higher power.

There are so many of us doing the work to change ourselves and change the world that I feel hopeful. It’s a sort of faith to lean into the voice of your calling.

As long as I live in service to the work, I trust that I will hear the next right step and I will take it.

The Humility of Being Alive

I thought this year was going to be ecstatic, coming out of two years of off-and-on quarantine. I thought we were going to Party with Purpose. I was ready for the new renaissance as people threw off their masks and started rejoicing in our shared struggles and survival, wondering what’s next, ready to build the new world. That was the optimistic side of me running a little wild.

Instead, the universe knocked me down to my knees, made me face the humility of being alive at all. I had a deep crash, a medicated depression, a few months of brain fog and confusion, wondering what the point of anything was.

Whenever I get too down or too dissociated, the natural world always brings me back. That tree. That squirrel. Those birds. Just walking around the neighborhood helps.

Nature has a calming effect. Grounding.

There’s this stretch of grass on my daily walk to the lagoon that I love to cross barefoot. I stop, take my shoes off, and revel in the grass underneath my feet. It’s very healing to walk barefoot on Mother Earth.

The gift of nature is the vision of the web.

Natural ecosystems have checks and balances, every living thing interacting with other living things. Humans have become so disenfranchised from nature that we don’t always realize that everything we have is from the earth, this incredible planet full of so many resources. The web of life.

What hubris for humans to extract without replenishment. That’s what the capitalist viewpoint misses: We need to work in tandem WITH the natural ecosystems, not just decimate the earth until there’s nothing left. Can’t we see what a losing move that is? Of course we need a habitable planet! How is that hard to see?

I think what is needed in the world is global empathy. Empathy for people across the world that you will never meet, for future generations you will never meet. Because we are all human. We all share similar needs, desires, and joys. We’re all one species. We need to learn from each other, not destroy each other. There’s no group of humans that are inherently better than other humans. We’re all deserving of resources. The global imbalance pains me.

Whenever I get too depressed about everything, I return to nature. I find faith in nature. I find peace. This world is so much bigger than any one of us, and we’re all connected. We are a human web within the web of life. I have to believe that the web of life is more magical than the forces of destruction. (Like Ferngully, my favorite childhood movie. That film creates tiny environmentalists.)

In the depths of despair, nature brings me back to the humility of being alive, of being some alive creature on this planet, alongside billions of other alive creatures. What a strange thing that is. To be a part of the web of life. It strikes so much awe in me that it replaces the other feelings of fear and dread.

To be alive is mysterious, and we all get to live this mystery every day.

It slows me down, helps me remember that everyone else is living their lives at this exact moment, all of us moving forward in the mystery of time. It’s not a race. It’s not a competition. I’m not ahead or behind anybody, better or worse than anybody else. I’m just where I am and they are where they are.

Humility.

Humility expands our capacity for connection.

We are better able to empathize with others, which makes us more cooperative, which in the long run means survival. Humans are a tribal species. We depend on each other to survive.

Now we’re globally interconnected more than ever before.

My life is a droplet in the ocean of 8 billion human lives. Sometimes that makes me feel insignificant and tiny, but at a deeper level, I know that what I do matters because we are all intricately connected on the web of life. I want to simultaneously hold love in my heart for everyone in the world enduring extreme suffering, and at the same time embrace the light-heartedness of love. Can I be both empathetic and light-hearted at the same time?

Be less attached to suffering, my higher power says.

Humility says, I’m not in control of everything. I don’t know everything. So I let go of my judgments, and in doing so, free up space in my heart to live my own life in the present moment. The only place we ever really are.

How to Deal with the World

I wake with a feeling of emptiness. I lack motivation at this time in my life.

I rouse myself. Change clothes. Make coffee. Take the dog out. Drink coffee. Vape. Sometimes I call a friend if I’m feeling especially in the hole. I need to figure out what to do.

I have some tasks on my desk, but for some reason I feel listless toward them. Working at home alone has its edges of loneliness, and too much alone time reminds me of the panic of pandemic.

“I feel like I need a dose of inspiration,” I say to Kurt on the phone.

“Why don’t you take a walk around the block with the binoculars?” he suggests.

So I do. I became an amateur birdwatcher later on in the pandemic, but I haven’t been investing much in it lately.

I walk around the block with my ears tuned to the sky. Whistles here and there. I follow the sounds.

I stand underneath the trees and lift my binoculars to the sky. I scan the trees, on alert for any sign of movement.

And there they are, caught in the viewfinder: Two green parrots perched on the inside of perfectly matched green foliage. They have a red outline of a circle with yellow in the middle on the tops of their heads. They’re just sitting there preening. One preens himself then pecks his beak over to his mate to pick at her feathers.

They’re perfectly hidden amongst the abundant green leaves. I feel like I witnessed a private moment. They’re out in the open but you’d never know they were there if you didn’t look up.

That was a magical way to break me out of my funk and remind me that there’s such delight in the natural world. The natural world is all around us. We coexist.

I’m looking for meaning, I said to myself as I embarked this morning.

I always am. It gets exhausting. The best part of my day yesterday was walking to the Colorado Lagoon and lying underneath the trees for a while.

I need a daily dose of nature. Somehow some way.

That’s how I deal with the cacophony of the world. I find refuge and peace in nature.

And they are two sides of the same coin: my love and reverence towards nature on the one side, and my fear and terror over environmental destruction on the other.

Because I love nature, I contribute my time to protect her.

Work, relax, work, relax. We go through the rhythms of life.

With ease and grace. Around the sun again. Wake, sleep, wake, sleep.

Today I was reminded, the magic is there if you look for it.

Room for All: Share Your Gifts

I tend to be mostly private with my writing. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I want only my best work “out there.”

And that’s fine and good for my poetry. I’m very selective when it comes to sending out work. I have learned (the hard way, but that’s a story for another time) only to send out work I truly, actually, forever want published. So that means my poems tend to take a very long time in the gestation phase before well-done enough to pass the quality test. That’s all fine with me.

But another level of writing is the creative personal essay. I miss my LiveJournal days of the early 2000s. Remember when we had to wait for dial-up and share the Internet with the phone service? Depending on your age, you will know what I’m talking about, but as a Millennial my teenage years paralleled the teenage years of the Internet. Before Tumblr, there was Myspace and LiveJournal, a handful of others I’m now forgetting. Where teens would go to pour their heart out to the quickly developing cybersphere. I used to journal online profusely. I spent a lot of my late childhood in blog culture on the Internet.

My true nature is a writer. I write every day when I’m a clear state of mind (though there are dark periods, for sure). Since 2013, I have written 3 longhand pages every single day in a notebook - Julia Cameron’s morning pages. (If you aren’t aware of The Artist’s Way, stop reading right now and check that out.)

Here’s the problem: Doing longhand pages in a notebook every day produces A LOT of scribbled notebooks. I went through a serious Marie Kondo phase during the pandemic, and it became clear just how much space my old notebooks were taking up in the closet. Notebooks on notebooks on notebooks of my daily journaling. Word regurgitation. All just tangled up in each other. (If I ever wrote something I thought was really interesting, I’d rip the page out and put it aside to type up as an Actual Thing. But so much did not make it to the tearing out phase.)

I’m talking three big boxes and two shoeboxes full of journals—nearly a whole closet shelf.

Overwhelming!

So, I’ve recently transitioned over to doing my morning pages on the computer by using 750words.com. It’s a platform for people to type their morning pages into a digital (private) system. Not a blog. Just a word dump.

I like it so far. From an environmental standpoint, it uses less physical resources. I don’t have to waste trees with something so prolific and mundane as my daily journaling.

What a relief!

I’ll deal with my previous journals later. Maybe I’ll comb through them looking for gold.

All this to say, writing is my gift. I’ve resisted it over and over again through the years, for varying reasons. But it’s always there.

So, if writing is my gift, I need to share it.

We all have gifts. I want there to be room for everyone to share their gifts. That’s a strong value of mine, one which I work to cultivate in my teaching and community building. It’s taken a backseat as I’ve been in a long winter for the past 10 months, and I am emerging back into Creator Mode now.

I want to send more energy into the intention of creating space for the cultivation of gifts, so I naturally need to practice it myself.

I’m taking a leap and starting a blog on my website. We’ll see how it develops. Hello!

As the introductory post, I’d just like to conclude by saying that I plan to write about what feels true to me on a deep level, including curiosities, insights, and questions. I’d like this to be a place to start a conversation. If I’m thinking about something, maybe others are too. I’ll leave comments on so we can talk!

What I think about a lot: climate change and sustainability, emotional and mental health, human behavior, individual and collective psychologies, mythologies, spiritual interpretations of the world, and the creative process.

See you soon!