1.
This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.
As usual I skip breakfast, because breakfast in prison is not worth the tray. It’s been years since I’ve gone. I pour myself a cup of black tea and eat seven saltines to cushion the Excedrin I swallow. I usually wake with a headache because I am a vampire and never go to sleep before midnight.
I call my husband, Dan, and tell him that a crocodile’s skin is more sensitive than human fingertips. This allows crocodiles to feel vibrations in water, which helps them catch prey.
Dan thinks this is interesting but not exactly relevant to his day. He plans to spend the afternoon bike riding in Minneapolis. I don’t tell him about the eight tenets of qigong. It’s important not to blow people’s minds before 7:30 AM. Maybe I’ll tell him on Friday—after I’ve changed the world.
I work as a clerk in the Transitions Center. We carry information packets about community services in every county in the state and five million brochures on everything from free tattoo removal to sober supportive housing. Along with two other clerks I spend my days creating résumés, drafting letters, gathering reentry resources, and steering people toward excellent futures. I do a lot of active listening and calming. I call my clients “contestants” and throw confetti on them (that I make with my three-hole punch) after they pass their written driving tests.
Today after work I meet a plastic-caped woman with a tinfoil cap. I want to believe she is a superhero, but it turns out she is a cosmetology student.
While waiting in the lobby of the prison’s salon to get my hairstyle improved, I read an article about monarch butterflies and learn that they taste like shit. As caterpillars they eat milkweed, and bitter toxins from the plant remain in their bodies. The article says another variety of butterfly, the viceroy, evolved to look like the monarch to defend itself from butterfly predators. Perhaps viceroys are delicious, but predators won’t go near them because they are disguised as fluttering shit snacks.
I close my eyes and think about being butterfly-small. Then I think about when I was person-small.
When we are young, we experience the world from the ground up. We live in a realm of coffee tables and carpets, electrical outlets and cords. An upright vacuum can make us anxious. In a crowd we are surrounded by kneecaps and dress hems and coat bottoms. We notice a run in someone’s nylons. We notice wads of gum on the sidewalk.
When I was very young—three, maybe four—I was walking next to my dad in a crowd of people. He was holding my hand. I don’t remember the occasion, but I was dressed in my burgundy winter coat with the green velvet collar. I had on black patent-leather shoes and tights and little white gloves. I was a fancy-dressed kid. Though it was the late sixties, my parents were not hippies. They were Tuck in your shirt and polish your shoes people. Keep your hair out of your eyes with a barrette people. Wear a watch people. I got a pink-banded, Cinderella-faced watch for my sixth birthday, before I was able to tell time. To be honest, learning to tell time was a struggle for me because the same moment could be called several things: a quarter after three, three fifteen, forty-five minutes till four. I could not figure out the right way to read a damn clock.
I don’t know why I let go of my dad’s hand—maybe I had an itch, or wanted a piece of candy from my pocket—but after I did what I needed to do, I reached up, found my dad’s hand again, and continued walking. A half minute later, I realized the hand wasn’t my dad’s. It belonged to another tall man wearing a suit. I let out a noise of panic and heard my dad’s laughter behind me. I ran to him and grabbed his leg. My dad picked me up and told me I’d offered my hand to the man walking two feet in front of him. The man had looked surprised but taken it.
My dad thought this was very funny. I did not.
2.
The second tenet of qigong is: The universe is made of energy and is always responding to our energy. If you put your hand out to the sky, someone will hold it. By raising your hands, you bring out people’s compassion. You unite with them in kindness.
I meet my friend Shuxin in the courtyard, and we walk in a large circle. It is hot. The air smells like lilacs because there are several lilac bushes close to the courtyard. Usually the air smells like whatever Food Service is working on for dinner, like fried onions or patty melts. Shuxin was born in China and knows a billion facts about the body because she is an acupuncturist. It was Shuxin who first told me about qigong and its eight energy tenets. Today Shuxin tells me that if you smear sour cream on your face, it will clear up acne, and that lemon juice reduces inflammation. She tells me there are lines of energy across our bodies that connect in unexpected places. For instance, your liver connects with your foot. That’s why a doctor trained in Chinese medicine can diagnose cancer by looking at your tongue or can smell your breath and know you have kidney problems. It’s wild. Shuxin also tells me to eat breakfast, but I don’t.
Sometimes I’m a bad listener.
After our walk it’s count time. Everyone has to be in their room, either standing at the door or sitting on the bed, while a guard walks by with a clipboard and counts us. While I sit on my bed and wait for the guard, I channel Ireland: The green. Fiddle music. The puffins who nest on the rocky western coast. I picture myself in raspberry wellies and an oversize knit sweater, carrying binoculars and a plaid wool blanket, walking the moors through long grasses and purple heather. I feel strongly that one should keep their distance from wild birds, even cute puffins, as they might poop on you. I don’t know what bird poop is composed of, but I’ve cleaned enough of it off windows to know it has a tenacious stick factor and that no person should get it on their skin.
I pull out my writing notebook with the Toni Morrison quote on the cover—“Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together”—and I work on a stanza for a collaborative poem that I’m writing with my friend Jason.
After count I walk to dinner with another friend, Shae. She tells me that last year the top five most popular names for male dogs were Max, Cooper, Charlie, Teddy, and Bear.
“What about females?”
“Luna, Bella, Daisy, and Lucy. I don’t remember the last one.”
“Well, tell me when you think of it. This kind of shit is important.”
She goes to the regular dinner line, and I go to the alternative. Regular trays have meat or fish and come with a dessert. Alternative trays are vegetarian and rarely have a dessert other than fruit, which everyone knows is not a dessert but a side to a sandwich. The vegetarian food is supposed to be mild, but sometimes that is a fib. I’ve had Spanish rice that would melt your hair.
My meal is lentil lasagna—disappointment on a tray. It is not even lasagna. Everyone knows pasta dishes are named after the noodle. Spaghetti and meatballs is made with spaghetti. Baked ziti is made with ziti. The prison’s lentil lasagna is not made with lasagna noodles but with little corkscrew pasta in tomato sauce with lentils and celery. I am eating lies. A few tables away Shae is eating something that resembles a hamburger. Approximately ten minutes into dinner, she remembers the fifth-most-popular female name for dogs and yells to me, “Bailey!” The woman sitting next to Shae is somewhat alarmed by this. I smile and finish my apple.
If I had a male cat, I would name him Wes Morgan, after my favorite retired soccer player. If I had a female cat, I would call her Esther. I just like that name.
After dinner I watch a lecture by the poet Brenda Shaughnessy. Shaughnessy says “fuck” a lot. She seems kind of angry. I appreciate her anger. I wonder if she wore a watch before she could tell time. I wonder if she ever practices qigong. Shaughnessy is talking to us about publishing our first books: What matters most to you will be there. She says that whatever theme we always circle around and go back to in our writing will be somewhere in the poem that we place first in the book.
I think about this and decide my work circles around soil and growth cycles and hope: hidden, wild, and rooted. Is that too many topics?
Then Shaughnessy talks about “proems.” A proem is an introduction to the rest of your work. When you write your book—your poetry book, not your badass spy thriller/novel/story collection/memoir—when you write your poetry book, you should put a proem after the table of contents, before the body of work. Shaughnessy says a proem is a placement poem that indicates where you are in the moment. It’s a chance for you to grab some extra space to be known before people read your first poem.
I take two deep breaths. We are so lucky to be alive.
3.
Tenet three is: Our bodies are made of energy. Energy is pliable, affected by thought, environment, food, water, and hairstyles. There is a reason hippies don’t have crew cuts.
I think of my energy as weather.
I wish I could be a 4 PM in late September in the Midwest. A little cool. A little gusty. I would like to say I’m that steel-gray sky right before a storm, when the wind kicks up and the branches dance. When you feel electricity in the air, when you pet your dog and his fur shocks you, when your hair has a mind of its own and all the birds and squirrels disappear. Smoldering emotion. Crackle and sizzle.
But, alas, I am not foreboding weather. The truth is I’m mostly sunny with an occasional cloud cover of sarcasm. I’m hopeful in the darkest of seasons. It’s annoying.
Our energy is also affected by the language around us.
I have a poet friend—a mentor, really—with whom I exchange words: words we like and words we don’t. We love yellow, button, and feather. We hate loins, milk, and seepage. Tic Tac, smock, and clamp are horrible words. Many of our despised words are fluid-related: moisture, sweat, slurp, urine, gulp. I’m in favor of quiet eating and not knowing anything about people’s bathroom activities. No scalp, zit, or throb here, thank you. Those words don’t taste good on the tongue.
My beautiful words are more varied. Some are just fun to say: wink, luminous, sublime, swimsuit. Some have that long e sound that makes your mouth smile even if you aren’t up for it: teakettle, velveteen, east. Others have a sensual soft p: puppet, puzzle, puffin. There are words that sound great only in an English accent, like Twitter, migraine, and vitamin. (Twitta, megrain, vittamin.) Lovely words of movement: waltz, bolt, tether.
Some words I love are not exactly nice, like malice, delusion, and nettle.
A few years ago I saw a show on PBS about happiness. One of the segments discussed how words affect us. The program highlighted a study that required two groups of people to create sentences from words provided to them, then walk down a hallway. One group was given neutral words, and the other was given words associated with being old: gray, wrinkle, retired. The test subjects were told the study was about language proficiency. But the study was really about how the test subjects walked down the hall after they read the words. The testers timed both groups as they walked. The “old” group was markedly slower than the neutral-word group.
If this effect occurs after encountering words for just a short time, we need to ask: What words do we surround ourselves with every day? I want less bitch, and fuck you, and slurs like gyp. More happy, darling, and fuzzy. More words that are kind, like gentle. Or words that tickle, like whisker.
4.
Tenet four. Halfway there. Our energy is linked—mind-body-spirit—in a system. According to yoga philosophy, there are several points of physical and spiritual energy in the human body and in the earth.
The seven body chakras and their associated colors are:
Root (base of spine near the tailbone): red
Sacral (between the tailbone and navel): orange
Solar Plexus (navel): yellow
Heart: green
Throat: blue
Third Eye (between the eyebrows): indigo
Crown (top of the head): purple
The seven earth chakras are found in the following locations:
Root: Mount Shasta, California
Sacral: Lake Titicaca, Bolivia and Peru
Solar Plexus: Uluru, Australia
Heart: Shaftesbury and Glastonbury, England
Throat: The Great Pyramid, Egypt, and the Mount of Olives, Israel
Third Eye: Glastonbury, England (for now; this chakra changes location)
Crown: Mount Kailash, Tibet
Tibet is the crown, the center of spiritual truth. I had always thought there was an earth chakra in London, but apparently that is inaccurate.
I’ve been to London. I was there with Dan and his dad, Bob, and Bob’s wife, Judy. I made them all go to the Tate Modern, and let’s just say they had little appreciation for the art on display. One of the pieces was by Marcel Duchamp, an early-twentieth-century French painter and sculptor. Duchamp is known for his “readymades,” everyday objects that he gave titles to and exhibited as art. The Tate had one of his most controversial—a urinal titled Fountain. My in-laws and my beloved got a real charge out of Marcel’s bathroom work. It was just a white porcelain urinal encased in a clear plastic cube. One of Duchamp’s hopes in displaying objects like this was to make people expand their own idea of art. Dan and his parents were not very open to expanding their ideas.
After our museum visit, as we walked back to our hotel, whenever we passed a crinkled paper bag on the ground, or an abandoned soda bottle, or a piece of newspaper blowing in the wind, they would say, “Oh, look at the art!”
They were raised by wolves.
5.
What is going on in the environment is reflective of our own energy. That’s tenet five.
I tell my friends: If you are in an environment that contains toxic people, do not complain about them. Don’t wish they would move away or go to solitary confinement or fall off their bunk. Don’t hope they’ll get unmanageable head lice or break out in hives or wash their sweats with a ChapStick in the pocket. Don’t wish that people on the outside who may or may not have lied about you in court or stolen all of your things will get run over by a bus.
Instead thank the universe—or whoever you think controls it—for everything running smoothly. Say things like:
“My room is peaceful.”
“The people in my life are calm and loving.”
“My lunch is delicious.”
I know this sounds crazy, but our beliefs alter our environment. Our gratefulness affects our energy. We need to listen to our best selves. To our personal music. Walter Anderson, a brilliant watercolor artist from Mississippi, once said, “All movement is to invisible music, although few people hear it.”
Sound imprints on the water in our bodies. I think this is why we are sensitive to music, and why certain songs become markers of times in our lives. Hearing any song by Creedence Clearwater Revival immediately puts me back at the age of three, riding my tricycle at breakneck speed around the basement, yelling, “It ain’t me! It ain’t me! I ain’t no senator’s son! It ain’t me! It ain’t me! I ain’t no fortunate one!”
I had no idea what this meant, but I knew it made my pigtails fly.
The Clash sends me to the summer of 1982 in Paris. David Bowie has me filling out college forms. The Talking Heads take me camping, drunk with friends.
If I hear “Hustlin’” by Rick Ross, I’m in the prison’s day space.
6.
Tenet six says, The same energy connects all life. This is hard to wrap my head around—that people who are extremely different from me are one with me. Yikes.
This tenet is problematic on many levels. We tend to feel superior to others. While most people don’t seem to mind sharing energy with a cute little bunny, we don’t want to be connected to people we don’t like or understand. For me it was professional wrestling. I did not appreciate this sports spectacular (or the wrestlers or the fans) until I heard a few years ago that children participating in the Make-a-Wish Foundation request to meet the wrestler John Cena more than any other celebrity, and the WWE has partnered with Make-a-Wish for forty years. What I viewed as ridiculous was a suffering child’s best day ever. Who am I to say what is stupid or beautiful? The truth is, everything is stupid beautiful. Everybody is beautifully stupid. We all share the same story. We share the same energy. We share the same oxygen. We share the same planet. And I am now proud to share energy with John Cena, Rey Mysterio, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the Undertaker.
7.
The seventh tenet is: All energy is continually in a state of transformation. This makes me think about raisins. Raisins are full of vitamin B6, thiamine, riboflavin, potassium, and iron. Like grapes, they are a source of quick energy due to their high sugar content. But here is the rub: While raisins are known to be a good source of iron, grapes are not. Where do raisins get their iron? What is really going on in the fruit world? I asked a nutritionist at St. Kate’s University, who told me that raisins “have a high concentration of nutrients after the dehydration process.” Hmm. This sounded highly suspicious to me.
I wonder if this grape-to-raisin transformation holds for people too. As people age, do they have a higher concentration of information, making them more valuable? Am I becoming a raisin?
I’m just asking.
I think the best way to transform energy is through compassion. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” This is simplistic. It’s like saying Taylor Swift is doing well this year. Or one shouldn’t light a match in the forests of California.
Compassion connects us to the world. It is a sensation we can feel in the mind and body. Like music. In both Arabic and Hebrew the word for compassion connects to the word for womb. Compassion gives life. It is a sharing of condition. It is universal.
We can enact the best part of ourselves by living out our compassion: sitting with people who have experienced loss, being present, and listening.
8.
Qigong’s eighth tenet is: Source energy is always available. We all carry our source energy. Regardless of whether we acknowledge it, it never leaves us. We all have a drop of God inside.
I have a Native friend named Marie. A few years ago she started fancy shawl dancing at powwows. The movement of fancy shawl dancing is supposed to resemble a butterfly. It is important to dance in time with the song and to finish with the last stroke of the drum. Marie’s goal was to place at a big competition.
There is a lot of money on the line for the dancers. Those who work the powwow circuit competitively expect to win. At one of the larger powwows of the year, Marie took second place. She was thrilled. The regulars were not.
At the next competition one of the regular dancers brought a handful of bad medicine. I asked Marie what bad medicine is made of. She said she’s never asked because she doesn’t want to be tempted to use it, but she knows the ingredients are cursed. The dancer placed the bad medicine on the ground in front of Marie, and Marie unfortunately stepped over it. Apparently stepping over bad medicine is very bad. Soon after, she became sick with a high fever and a stomachache. Her mom took her to a doctor, but the doctor could not find anything physically wrong with her. Then Marie started having trouble with her eyes. They were cloudy, and she could barely see. Her mother took her to a medicine man for a healing ceremony.
Marie sat in a chair in a darkened room. Marie’s mom, the medicine man, his wife, and an elderly woman from the community were also there. I asked Marie what everyone was wearing. She said that all of the women (including herself) were wearing ribbon skirts of different colors, and the medicine man wore jeans and a button-down shirt and a bandanna. He was also wearing a special necklace made of bear claws or teeth. The medicine man placed a scallop shell about the size of an English muffin in the middle of the room. He shook his rattles and sang, calling in spirits to help him. Every so often at the ends of the medicine man’s rattles Marie saw what looked like energy beams or little bolts of lightning. Then she started seeing shadowy figures in the room. She couldn’t describe them very well—the room was dark, and her eyes were bad.
She was terrified. She felt pain in her eyes and stomach. She tried to focus her attention on healing her eyes.
The medicine man stopped singing and shaking the rattles, and the ghost shadows disappeared. When the lights were turned on, Marie could see clearly. In the shell were two superthin needles and some gel-like goo. The medicine man said they were taken from Marie’s body.
I don’t know anything about bad medicine, and I’ve never met a medicine man, but I think there are many ways that God works—through nature or music or plants or animals or people—to make us whole. If we ask for help, we need to accept it in whatever form it shows up.
I trust that if ever I step over bad medicine, a medicine man will be there for me.
It is always possible to connect with source energy.
Do you know what else is always available? Our thoughts. These two things, our thoughts and source energy, can blow up the universe.
*
It’s a little past midnight. I’m listening to the only true American art form: jazz. Specifically, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
I am grateful that John William Coltrane found a saxophone.
I am grateful for the iron in raisins.
I am grateful for all of my teachers.
