ZoomRoom Local Author Reading – Christin Lore Weber
Please join me in the launching of my new novel, NO THIS BUT THIS, on February 12th at 5 P.M. Pacific Time. Your free registration is in the above link from Art Presence Gallary.
Christin
For great posts about the business of art, check out The Artsy Shark HERE!
  |  Bill and his grandson, Jad In half-dream last night I saw him in sunlight as an eagle and I must have been the hawk riding the thermals above the Applegate hills. Wind ruffled our feathers and seemed to blow right through us as we circled. Those cries are all the words, I thought, hearing the birds’ cries echoing off the ridges of the Buncom Bowl. It was the sound that bound us. Our feathered wings never touched. It is a rare privilege to have had a friend like Bill Cunningham. He died this week–January 12th. I knew he’d fly soon, but one never really experiences death of a loved one until it happens. For half our lives we had lived a continent apart and saw each other only once, a few years ago when he made the trip west. But all that time, writers that we both were, Bill and I shared our souls in words. I met Bill in the early 1970s just after I had left the convent and he was one of the priests at the University of Minnesota Newman Center. He resembled a Hoffman Jesus and delivered homilies that urged the congregation to respond. Who could not notice him? Already he was in the forefront of a new and progressive Catholic Christianity–maybe he already was past that, though it still held him in its grasp. When he invited discussion, I loved the challenge and would take him on. It was so stunning–the way he stopped to reflect on everyone’s insight or question. He spoke from his sense of compassion, not from some cast-in-stone dogma. He was a Dominican Friar of the Order of Preachers–those who back in the day were in charge of the Inquisition. He, already then, detested (not too strong a word, I think) that historical connection. He and I sat on my porch in St. Paul one summer day in the mid-1970s. He was right on the verge of leaving the priesthood and the Dominicans. He’d come to talk it over with my now deceased spouse, Pat Kelly, who had also left the active priesthood, and with me–recently dispensed from convent vows. Bill was deeply in love with Liliana, and his edgy relationship with the Church was beginning to feel impossible to maintain. The angst of finalizing the decision that would affect his remaining life, though, showed itself in his face and posture. He quoted passages from the then popular novel, The Thornbirds. What did it mean to be faithful? The whole struggle felt like such a paradox. He married Lili.  If I were writing a book, Part Two would begin the day Bill came from Florida in 1985 to spend the afternoon with Pat and me the day before Pat had cancer surgery from which he never recovered. We didn’t know that, of course, the afternoon we sat together in my living room listening to Symphony #7 by Ralph Vaughn Williams, with the poetry of Walt Whitman. I still see him in memory–eyes closed, focused, silent, aware, compassionate, as though he saw all our lives in this one moment. I do not regret this journey. We took risks, we knew we took them, Things have come out against us, Therefore we have no cause for complaint. -Walt Whitman We didn’t see each other again for thirty years. In the meantime, though, our friendship developed a character of presence. I had moved to California and remarried. Bill and Lili and their girls lived a creative and socially involved life in Florida. But we phoned. When email became available we did that. Mostly we lived in each others’ souls. I was writing my books, now seventeen of them. Bill read every one and commented on all but the last. As our patterns of belief evolved we shared our newest realizations with each other, always reaching deeper and deeper for wisdom. He became more earthy–“I’m a pagan,” he insisted–while I drifted further and further into the mystical. Both of us began writing poetry. He would email from airports across the country while he worked as a management consultant. We shared ideas, beliefs, poetry, books we were reading, personal struggles and joys, hopes, dreams. He called himself Pilgrim-Seeker. He called me Dreamer-Weaver. We seemed to share one time and space while also being a continent apart. Last night in my grief over his death it came to me that very little had changed. As the poet, Yeats, had written, I loved the pilgrim soul in him. Except for the written words we shared for so many years, that soul of his remained. His presence lingers in all my books as well. His last poem written for me holds the paradox: Failure of Language The role of the artist is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. –James Baldwin We once wrote each other often, to tell the intimate tales of our lives, rich in language, intricate in detail, full of ideas and hope. Then gradually, we stopped, not for lack of caring, of that I’m sure, but perhaps because we had drained out of language all we could. Then the sudden harshness in our lives, raw and open, the painful death of our spouses, left us stunned and speechless, standing on a strange shore, looking out onto a vast sea where there were no islands, no sails, no other shore that we could see. Perhaps we had given all we could to one another and now had to face realities where language, our common gift, once our great solace, could not help. -September 4, 2020 Words have done as he said. Words are fragile and eventually cannot hold reality. We ourselves eventually feel more attuned to the wordless winds We set out then, finally comfortable with the silence of our heart’s depths, onto the seas of which Whitman and Williams wrote, and Bill, Pat and I contemplated all those years ago. To Bill I now say, set forth and fare thee well. I bear witness to the magnificence of your life, your soul, my dear friend. Sail forth–steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail. Whitman’s “Passage to India.”
My attempts to let this novel go into the world haven’t been easy. It has been finished for a few months, just resting next to my computer, waiting for me to DO something. I don’t know: blow trumpets or do a few rolls on the snare drum. But there it sat. Too intimate, maybe. But this is not a memoir. The main character and I are not the same person, though I do recognize so much about her responses to life, Her life, a quite different life from mine. Her name is Ella, and she and I are the same age–in the final years of a lifetime. She lives pretty much where I do, but not in the same house. As the story opens, Ella’s life is in fragments. She has lost so much and been unable to make sense of her experiences. I may have been influenced by a review by Sandra Scofield of a friend’s memoir: “[This] memoir is breathtakingly passionate, painful and exhilarating. A mature and gifted writer answers the question most of us don’t dare to ask: Did I live the right life?” No This But This is a work rising up from the way life tends to coalesce and integrate with age and longevity. I wrote it from my soul’s depth, and the only part that does not come from there is the the story itself. What an odd experience writing this novel has been. Each character is, as it were, my soul in a different form, with a different history, following a different path, experiencing different challenges and conflicts, and resolving them in ways different from ways I have chosen. At first, I didn’t know how to classify the book. In a way, it is a memoir, except that these scenes never happened to me personally. By the same token, while writing I was remembering something internal, so intimate that I’m still shaken by having enclosed it in words that describe a fictional scene. Like a shaman’s journey, the writing of this book seemed to dismember me and cast the scraps of my own life to the wind. I’m hoping this: that the completed novel carries in its characters and their story the intensity and intimacy about life’s choices that I felt while I was writing.
My attempts to let this novel go into the world haven’t been easy. It has been finished for a few months, just resting next to my computer, waiting for me to DO something. I don’t know: blow trumpets or do a few rolls on the snare drum. But there it sat. Too intimate, maybe. But this is not a memoir. The main character and I are not the same person, though I do recognize so much about her responses to life, Her life, a quite different life from mine. Her name is Ella, and she and I are the same age–in the final years of a lifetime. She lives pretty much where I do, but not in the same house. As the story opens, Ella’s life is in fragments. She has lost so much and been unable to make sense of her experiences. I may have been influenced by a review by Sandra Scofield of a friend’s memoir: “[This] memoir is breathtakingly passionate, painful and exhilarating. A mature and gifted writer answers the question most of us don’t dare to ask: Did I live the right life?” No This But This is a work rising up from the way life tends to coalesce and integrate with age and longevity. I wrote it from my soul’s depth, and the only part that does not come from there is the the story itself. What an odd experience writing this novel has been. Each character is, as it were, my soul in a different form, with a different history, following a different path, experiencing different challenges and conflicts, and resolving them in ways different from ways I have chosen. At first, I didn’t know how to classify the book. In a way, it is a memoir, except that these scenes never happened to me personally. By the same token, while writing I was remembering something internal, so intimate that I’m still shaken by having enclosed it in words that describe a fictional scene. Like a shaman’s journey, the writing of this book seemed to dismember me and cast the scraps of my own life to the wind. I’m hoping this: that the completed novel carries in its characters and their story the intensity and intimacy about life’s choices that I felt while I was writing.
I had written of him in journals and seen him We joined our lives, married for twenty-three 
I’m grateful to announce the publication of A For your enjoyment I’ve included a little scene from 1958 when John and I were first aware of our love, but both of us were already committed to a different kind of life–he was signed up for a career in the Air Force, and I was already accepted to enter a Roman Catholic Convent. He was 18 and I was 17 years old. It is a Friday night in spring, and John has shown up for the Teen Club dance at the Moose Lodge. He’d never attended before, and my heart knows he has come that night because I will be there. We dance. I leave with him. In memory I am walking down the hill with John towards the Baudette Bay. We turn the corner and walk alongside the bay all the way to my home. The air smells of wet leaves. I’m an April crocus. I’m water pressing under river ice, flowing towards the lake, breaking winter from beneath. Nothing can stop this movement. It is the attraction that moves the stars. I catch his eye. He gazes at me–in the classroom, at Mass, from the Plymouth cruising down Main Street. When I walk beside him I am safe; I am who I am; I find myself; I feel the warmth of him even without a touch. He is John. He is God. How can there be any difference? My mind tells me there is certainly a difference, and I am moving towards danger. ‘You be careful!’ my mind warns. ‘If you really do intend to answer God’s call, you will have to leave this boy and soon. Don’t fall in love; it will be too hard.’ But it is too late. I am in love already.” I hope to meet you in these pages. You can purchase the book at Amazon.com. https://www.amazon.com/author/christinweber Christin  Just before Christmas 2019 a box filled with copies of my newest book arrived at my door. Here it is! A book of stories from my early childhood when I was Mary Jane Lore and my world consisted in the boundary waters of Minnesota and Ontario, Lake of the Woods, at my grandparent’s fishing resort. I am one of the few people who remembers these places as they were in those days, 1940-1948, or who collected the stories of the olden days before my birth when even grandparents had been young. A few years ago I began to go through old pictures given to me by my Grandmother Elizabeth Klimek and by her eldest daughter, my Aunt Eva Mapes. One picture at a time I took from bags or boxes and pondered, smiling or weeping but always remembering. Then I wrote the story of the person or place depicted. In the writing I let myself enter the little girl Mary Jane’s experience as a three, four, or five year old–those flashes of memory that seem permanently sealed upon my heart and mind. Woven among those episodes and images the now much older writer in me, Christin, followed their trail to where it faded into forgetfulness or was lost altogether. The crumbling of houses and landscapes. Development of something new. Death of the old and then the death of those who remembered them. At first I recorded these stories and descriptions in another blog by the same name as the book. Then as I kept getting older and saw my grand nieces and nephew being born and already older than I was when I experienced this life and land, I began to think it needed to be a book that the Klimek and Lore families could hold in their hands. And then I thought of the place, Baudette, Minnesota and Lake of the Woods County for which these stories are part of history. And then I thought of old people I’ve known all my life–how they enjoyed telling the stories of their past. When my grandmother told me stories I enjoyed it and could see that she enjoyed it, too. But what I have experienced now that I didn’t appreciate as a child is the absolute pleasure of storytelling, especially for the elders among us. The joy is this: we return in memory to places and people that no longer can be found anywhere on earth. Every time the story is repeated we find ourselves in that place among that company. That entire world is resurrected in our minds. What could be more glorious than realizing that even in the sad stories, the painful ones, being there again is good. My Aunt Edith from the Lore family told me many stories about my Grandma Klimek from years before I existed. When Edith was a teenager she worked at the resort and my grandmother was her boss. And every time Edith told the story while I visited her (over and over and over) her characterization of Grandma differed just a bit. It was growing. She actually was redeeming my grandmother as she re-imagined the story. She also was redeeming her perspective on that time of her own life when she saw the content of an experience far more and more clearly than its context. She became more compassionate as the story of my grandmother and her boss developed. And every single time she insisted on her memory’s accuracy and that her story was absolutely true. It is the task of age to integrate the person’s entire life. A memoir unlike autobiography gathers together the truths stored in the heart more keenly than in the mind. It is a compassionate view of life. We attempt to get the facts right, but ultimately that isn’t the goal. A memoir records a person’s attempt to bring wholeness to memories from a limited time of life. And while it doesn’t deny the wounds inflicted by all sorts of violence, a memoir searches into even the most painful time until it can lean towards understanding and compassion. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com, only in paperback. It is full of pictures as well as stories which made a Kindle ebook a bit beyond my skills.  Here is one of my favorite pictures of Alla. She’s in her yard at Wisdom House where flowers grow in abundance. She and I go way back. Let’s see: 46 years? I do believe that’s the correct number. We first met in my apartment in St. Paul, not long after I left the convent and she was ordained an Episcopal priest in a ceremony in Philadelphia that made the history books. That day at my apartment she sat on the living room floor (I had no furniture yet) and performed one of her most famous poems for me, “Bakerwoman God.” We went on from that moment to become deep and loving friends. She has been present with me at virtually every profoundly life-altering moment. Just after another life-altering event, she arrived by way of my inbox in the form of a poem that resulted from the State of the Union address for 2020. In her characteristic way of finding the meaning in even the most confusing and maddening circumstances, she had written a message straight from the heart of wisdom, a combination poem, meditation, and priestly sermon that she’s given me permission to share with you. Opposite Day Is when a man who calls women of purpose “feminazis” receives the Medal of Freedom from a man who brags about grabbing women’s birth-giving parts for fun, and when someone who respects freedom and women is vilified for speaking up (finally) against injustices and wrongdoings at the top, while others who are worn out from doing so forget themselves and slip from their normally rational and respectful positions to use the extremist language of the unjust against them. Bear up. This day will be over soon. Not soon enough, we think or say, but still, soon. Compared to the lifetime of a river or the ocean, soon. From inside human time, not soon enough. But still we need to, more than ever, practice our principles and keep our dignity and virtue, even and especially when they are opposite from the new norms of vulgarity. And did I mention cruelty? We have to oppose cruelty by practicing kindness so that we can consistently address it effectively to where it is most needed~ and for as long after that as we are alive. We have to have faith in the power of a good example, even when the bullies ridicule us or the bullets threaten us. We have to remember how easy it is to be so frustrated that we become bullies ourselves, and hold ourselves to those checks and balances which we so value. Even when the bullies seem to win, even when they gloat with glee as they count their profits, we are not losers as long as we listen to our own best prophets, keep true to our values and sustain and protect the blueprint for restoration after they have set fire to the wonderful world that we used to share. There will always be malcontents who insist on trying to improve on perfection, and thereby ruin things that were actually working, and are still needed at home and worldwide. Without those many good things now destroyed out of vanity, know it or not, we all suffer. Those who profit by the exploitation and neglect of others may suffer when the bridges they drive on daily collapse under them. Or the tainted water which even they drink poisons them. So encourage more and more of us to carry on and stay the course. Life is for more than wishes and whens. Life is for living the best ways we can with each other, with the most integrity we have, and maybe a little bit more than usual in violent and challenging times. Every single day, God bless us and them, and Amen. Alla Renée Bozarth For the work in progress, Quartet, Part One, Swinging Over the Edge of the World, Copyright © 2020.
John and I spent a few stormy days on the Oregon Coast last week. My hope was to work on my new novel which I started almost a year ago after publishing CHIARA REFLECTIONS, poetry from the heart of Clare of Assisi. Still in the grip of poetry and also of my experience of writing my novel, WIDOW’S WALK, I easily fell into an intuitive style of composition. As soon as my creative function was convinced about my intention not to plan ahead–to have no outline, no sense of plot or theme, nothing but a kind of inner space, something awoke in me. She was an old woman, a hermit, with dreams and memories and a deep question about her life that she never had resolved.
At the coast I opened the document to the 172 pages I’d written in the past six months. So far, so good–even though I still didn’t know quite where I was headed. I had followed through on the intuitive process and remain excited over where it had taken me from that first day in the springtime of 2019 to where I found myself and my fictional characters now at the beginning of 2020.
The old woman whose name turned out to be Ella, already in the first chapter wonders about her mother. She ponders…
She walked where land is flat. She wrapped her wind-blown hair in a kerchief, waiting out the war. She held my hand. The river emptied into Wood Lake at Four Mile Gap. We searched the beach for arrowheads and chunks of pottery left by the Originals. She told stories of olden days. We sat underneath a paper birch tree and she gazed out to water’s end where, in the evenings, sunlight turned to topaz then to garnet and made her cry. She drew up her knees and bent her forehead down to rest on them. Her sobs were flights of birds. “Mama, Mama,” emerged from me like the mewing of our banished cat. I used the wings of her birds to make my way inside her to investigate the branches of her soul. I opened the gates of her deep red heart and went inside where echoes of her sobs bounced off my mind like puff balls from milkweed. “I cannot, I can Not,” the milkweed puffs sang like baby birds born and trapped inside me. Her knees could no longer hold her head and all her body was a puppet when fingers release the strings. She collapsed and came apart around me. Oh!
Mother slept in her tears and with my most gentle finger I one by one gathered every drop and placed it on my tongue where it would become a part of me and stay through all my years.
Why did she cry? What could she not? Is there anyone…? No one? None? I could not and so I knew her at the very least that much. For years I hoped someone could, but then she began to keep a gun in the top drawer beside her bed and I knew.
Distance for her was absolute.
I know this: I will continue.
Christin Lore Weber
copyright, 2019 
In this life I’ve not travelled much outside North America. Go deep, an inner voice instructed, and so I let that happen first on the boundary waters of Minnesota and Ontario, and then in a convent beside the Red River of the North. In the middle of life I uprooted myself and came to be transplanted on the Pacific Coast. Later I would make a few short trips to England and Ireland. I never travelled far from the waters of earth, and water became a mirror from which soul might reflect.
“Our years are seventy, and eighty if we are strong,” the Hebrew Scriptures say. And I was in my seventh decade before I traveled with my new husband, author John R. Sack, to Italy to celebrate our marriage with a pilgrimage to the holy places of St. Francis and St. Clare. He had written an historical novel set in the era just after the death of Francis, a book which had brought the two of us together in what he calls our wisdom years. And in 2011 we wanted to walk the paths that Francis walked and to visit the convent of San Damiano in Assisi where Clare had lived.
Although I had connections with women in Minnesota who followed the Rule of St. Clare and lived lives of enclosure, I hadn’t entered a Franciscan convent myself. I had, however, considered it as early as my twelfth birthday. I received a book from the Franciscans of Little Falls, Minnesota, explaining the Franciscan way of life, but the Sisters in the town where I lived were not Franciscan, and they were the Sisters I knew, loved, and joined. Consequently, I was not prepared for what happened to me in Assisi.
In Assisi I met Chiara—Clare’s name engraved in Italian on the statue honoring her in the cathedral there. I truly have no way to describe how this happened. I can describe the places John and I visited, the stories we were told, the landscapes, caves, and churches—the worn stones on which these people once walked. Something of them, Francis and (in her Italian language) Chiara, remains alive there, and it shook me to my core. It burned in my heart. I entered a cave, touched a stone, knelt in a small chapel, stood on the stone stairs in San Damiano and something so powerful took hold of me, over and over it took hold, making even simple breath a whirlwind. “What am I going to do?” I fell into John’s arms and wept. This thirteenth century woman had grasped my soul with an intensity too great for me, but she wouldn’t let me go.
Back in Oregon we dedicated our home to her.
And now, these poems.
Sometimes I watch her; sometimes she speaks in her own voice to me. The poems came through me in both third and first person, but all of them are reflections of Chiara as I bent back towards her, as I gazed. Her spiritual teacher from childhood was a man from her own town of Assisi, Francis Bernardone whose imprint on his town, his country, his church, and the entire world’s history remains. Francis and Chiara of Assisi have been relevant in every era up to our own. And back in the thirteenth century the young woman named Chiara left her home to join Francis and his dream of living exactly as Jesus of Nazareth had lived—an authentic Christianity. And Chiara loved him, loved both of them—Jesus the Christ and the poor man, Francis of her own home town.
Both Francis and Chiara lived extraordinary lives. Both were mystics burning with divine love. This love united them and it was in this love that they recognized each other. Despite stories and movies to the contrary, I don’t believe they ever had a sexual relationship nor desired one. All love of that sort was burned in a divine and universal fire and transformed into the very love of God, so profoundly that their love for one another became identical with their love in and for God.
In my journal I wrote: Here’s what I know about Clare’s yearning. In the museum below Santa Chiara Cathedral in Assisi is an alb made of lace which she made for Francis. I can’t remember how many years she worked on it. It’s like spider webs, fine, almost falling apart now even behind the glass. Something about that lace holds a fierce yearning, one she believed she shared with Francis. Was the union in the simple understanding that someone in this world experienced a yearning as intensely as did she? Such yearning cannot be mingled, I think. It is solitary. But just knowing that someone else experiences such infinity of longing causes love. As though the lace were a language of the soul to say, “I want to veil the profound darkness in you with these webs of white lace, something of light, so that you do not succumb to your desperate aloneness, so that you do not give way to a belief that darkness is all there is, but that having finally touched the deepest fields of night, even there you will realize that there is yet More, there is a fullness opening to you, an endlessness that not only fills you completely, but is what you are. And it is Light. It is Love.”
Maria Popova writes, “Even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens and the kernel of a revolution slips through.”
From time to time I wonder if these mystics, Chiara and Francis, found their way through the mesh of certitude to glimpse truths beyond their era’s horizon, truths that science only recently would discover, or that a psychology of self-integration would realize. Chiara, herself proclaimed a saint by the church she both loved and challenged during her life, was a woman who claimed her womanhood and the freedom it accorded her. She was the first woman to establish a religious community of women living according to a structure and rule she herself designed. Up to then nuns lived according to rules written by men such as St. Benedict and St. Augustine. The Poor Ladies of San Damiano lived according to the Rule of Chiara. She petitioned Rome again and again to approve her plan. And she didn’t die until the Pope finally agreed. Already, though, groups of “Poor Clares” had come together across Europe. In Bohemia the woman, Agnes of Prague, a royal woman betrothed to the Emperor Frederick II, chose instead to follow Chiara and establish a group of Poor Clares in her own country. The letters between Chiara and Agnes along with the unique Rule and Testament have formed the basis of study, spiritual enlightenment and women’s rights even to this present day.
We humans rarely if ever know what we set in motion simply by living our lives and making what choices we can.
These poems are the product of prayer and contemplation. They are historical only in the broadest sense. I hope, however, they remain true to the spirit of Chiara even while their details are mostly images derived from my own imagination. (from the Introduction) You can purchase this book by ordering it from your local bookstore or by going directly to Chiara Reflections 
Work begins in the intersection of night and day; in darkness. Material life tumbles out onto me. Heavy life. How can I carry it? How bear it, aching? “I am overwhelmed,” I complain to John as he plans his garden, soon to be added to our care. I imagine vegetables tumbling into sinks, soil everywhere, choking the spaces, taking the time, burying us in tangles of vines, clumps of rot, bubbling pots of produce, the heat of summer kitchen when already we have too much. I have too much. I’m bent under the too much. Dust collects on books, on trinkets, keepsakes. I can’t breathe due to the weight of it. It is a grave.
Tucked into crannies wait the refuse of past years. 1985. I find an expanding file of letters, cards, clippings, while searching for fragments of time with Marie—her poems, snatches of words collected before we had e-mail and the pulse of life in my mind flowed through a pen onto paper. The press of pencil or pen onto the page carried the life of the person’s hand. The length of a line carried across the page before the hand released and lifted. Death has taken the bodies of the people who held the pen, but their lives remain in the lines.
How can I rid myself of such evidence? How can I live underneath it? Here is a letter from someone named Michele. Lines bend beneath her feelings. My eyes touch the lines like fingers touching her skin, tracing a path of tears down her face. She left my life almost fifty years ago, but the letter remains. It is a relic. It has power. One only letter such as this could be framed and worshipped as a fragment left behind of God.
Creation requires space. Even burial under beauty, under love, under food will choke out life, will suffocate. But each fragment pleads to remain, to be. | |||||||
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