The road between friends is never long.

The road between the stories friends tell is a ‘golden pathway’ as my friend James Lawrence writes here. Jimmy and his wife, my Moon Sister, Tomma traveled not very far, but far enough to join us for ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ a week ago Friday.

Here is what he said:

A good story is a golden pathway. It takes you places you would likely never go on your own. It lets you pull on another’s skin and walk around in it for awhile, breathe life in with it, see the world through a different gamut of colors.
Good stories touch the deepest, hidden chambers of your heart, those secret places you forgot you still lived in, and they make you want to occupy those places again, and more fully.
Sitting in the audience the other night at the Out of the Mouths of Babes reading at Simon’s Rock took me and my wife Tomma on some amazing journeys into those neglected pockets of love, loss, hope and pain, discovery, redemption: the evening was absolutely and completely compelling, beautiful and inspirational!
I heard the echoes of my own conscious, deliberate, joy/pain-full fatherhood of raising my two wonderful girls, in the brave, touching, funny, authentic pieces read by the authors. I felt again my own womanly/manly love for my children that burned so fiercely in those years and which has never left me. It made me want to be more brave in my own writing. This is the courage of women, the true courage all of us can rise to: the courage to be our full and authentic selves, and I admired it so in every phrase, every turn of the stories the women read to us.
The readings and the many bright, engaged faces there also brought me back to a sense I have had for much of my adult life that the company of women can so easily be an inspiring, exciting, ultimately transformative place to go, no matter what our sex. It brought smiles, tears and a return to a sense of creative home that I’ve been missing for so long, and renewed my appetite for more.
I love the feminine heart and energy! We need it so. It may yet save our human world, one soul at a time. Thank you!

It is thrilling to sense what Jimmy received as an audience member. In any expression of art that is given to the world, your audience gives you, the artist, gifts. With lifted faces they watch you closely, that golden pathway illumined from both ends, from giving and receiving. This constitutes the interchange of energy between performers and an audience no matter the medium nor the complexity of the offering.

Sandy Mattucci and I met at last summer’s International Women’s Writing Guild conference at Yale. She attended ‘Out’ with her friend, Alberta and so generously offered this:

Delighted’ in being ‘present ‘ at the Festival of Women Writers at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. The muse stirred in me listening to the gift ‘mothers’ had to share. It awakened in this single woman again & again…not able to birth yet birthing the creative child within only now through my soulful artistry and the breaking open of the Divine story that dwells in ‘all’ of us. Blessings, 
Sandy
“Thank YOU Suzi…U R gift”

Sandy came to our event from Connecticut, via Albany NY, bearing gifts. She and her creative partner Edwina Gately have written a book published by Orbis Books, titled
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters Standing on Their Shoulders. This book captures the stories of women in history like Hildegard of Bingen to Wangari Muta Maathai and includes poetic prayers or invocations in the voice of the Divine, for each woman captured by Sandy’s pencil drawings of each one. Joyful, prayful, and reverent- these stories engage at the level of each woman’s passion.

Sandy offered one of her books as a gift for our drawing. And, in the perfection of chance, Steph Campbell, our chanteuse for the evening, won that book.

Steph Campbell joins Jimmy and Sandy in this favorite frame because of joy. These three friends of mine show up for me with a readiness to play that only makes me smile to think of it now. When I told Steph about ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ the first thing out of her mouth was an offer to sing. And despite weathering the sad loss of her dear mother just a few weeks ago, Steph held to her offer and gave us a lullaby to her son Jonah and another of her beautiful songs. She is ‘amazing grace’.

What we offer each other, friends or not, is our attention. I am intrigued by Jimmy’s phrase ‘the golden pathway’ because of the invitation to journey together. I often think of my creativity as being accessed by a portal, but through that portal is the pathway.

In their generous offerings of songs, books and comments, my friends remind me that in giving my work to the world I am not alone. We have each given and each received.

I must introduce you now to my friend Lori Landau. She is our next featured blog author in the ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ blog series on mothering and creativity.
Lori and I met on Face book and find each other at odd hours, sharing the same things or sending photos to each other that remind one of the other and lo, this new friendship strengthens along this golden pathway we tred together, as we share mail art, stories, photographs and now, blog posts. Here she says,

I believe that the reason we all connect to the arts is because we yearn to merge, that we’re attracted to universal soul, that when we are touched by another’s self-expression it makes us feel connected to something larger than our own self-perceived ordinariness.

Lori and I have discovered a common ground that began on the internet, but, as we have entered the ‘golden pathway’ of sharing our stories and art, we find ourselves looking out at the world from our similar red chairs- where we daily sit to write and meditate. We have sons of similar ages. We yoginis. We look at the world from inversions in hopes to shift our stuck places through gravity and insight. I love Lori’s post today. Her illustrations are there too. Dig in to this new ‘Out’ post and see the wonders of a mother’s inner life revealed through her art.

mail art from Lori to me

It is a fine day for laundry today, sunny and dry.
And, a fine day to cross the portal to the ‘golden pathway’.
Thank you for walking with me.
Love,
S

I like my town. We have the best library though the ladies there are not so indulgent with out-of-towners like me. I no longer have the power of my Mom beside me to still any questioning of who I might be and where from. I have been a card-carrying daughter of a local for many more years than I actually lived there.

My Mom is living in a nursing home now. My Stepdad does not believe in reading, so he had no card to offer me. I did get to check out some books by way of a gracious gentleman who shared a table with my Stepdad. Looking up from the jigsaw puzzle he labored over, Bud raised his bushy eyebrows to offer me the indulgence of his card privileges, as long as I pledged to return the books in a timely fashion. So, I went home with a stack of art books to keep me company by the fire. I dug around at home to find Mom’s library card and tucked it away for next time.

I was in the UP for my Stepdad’s 90th birthday. We had quite a party complete with wine over lunch and a wonderful long story of his life in the UP. He is a forester and one of the earliest graduated from MSU. He and his cronies know the landscape with an eye for profit for the paper companies in forest products. They also know how to land walleye and survive the black flies. We celebrated Pa in the grandest fashion he would allow, balloons on the table and everything.

I visited my Mom. She is in a home with all sorts of people her age and older suffering from the rainbow of maladies the elderly endure. Mom has emerged from a 9-month bout with seeming nearly dead. Now, it is possible to have a bit of conversation with her and delight in her laughter, which makes all the hassle of getting there effortless. She is impish in her wheelchair and naughtily unlatches her seat belt, causing alarms to ring down the hall. She loves to read whatever she lays her eyes upon. I consider painting her walls with stories, because she would read them, one word at a time. Some moments were better than others, but it was a visit all the same, and much better than sitting next to what I thought would soon be her dying body. This was much more fun.

I like my town and I like my family. I like the friends I made when I lived there. They are among my most precious treasures. So are the memories of ice-skating way out on the bay to see fisherman working or walking the alleys with Mom collecting dandelions for our guinea pig. Kids I grew up with terrorized people by stealing carrots from backyard gardens. This weekend it rained on the snow and ice, so skating was dismal, but romantic all the same. The Upper Peninsula yields its beauty to those who can endure the flies, the weather and the nicknames, even if you are a visitor.

Snow and Ice are very nice