1.
Wet cake still crumbles
Wet crumbs are still worth eating
With the bigger spoon
2.
California cold
Forty-five and I’m freezing
Meditate in fuzzy sock
I Guess I Was a Writer All Along
When my fiancé got into bed with me last night he started talking about how he used to tape whole albums off the radio when he was a kid. He got specific. He had to have his mom buy him TDK 90 minute blank tapes—the solid gray ones in the gold wrappers, $2 apiece and sold in packs of five. Maxell was so-so—he would settle for Maxell, but Memorix with its clear tapes and groovy shapes all over was the worst of the worst and he wouldn’t put a single note on that.
He talked about cataloguing the tapes—one album per side. Listening to the DJs talk about the albums and all the music trivia. He still listens to music talk, constantly. He follows about six hundred rock music podcasts and can DJ every song on Sirius with about thirty times the DJ juice as whatever has-been they’ve hired. He is an encyclopedia of rock. Sometimes I’ll turn on classic rock stations that I only marginally like just to give him the opportunity to fan his feathers for me, and it is glorious.
He told me he tried the guitar and piano as a kid because those are the types of instruments a blind kid is supposed to go for, but it wasn’t until someone put him in front of a drum kit that he thought yes…. I can really find my way around here. It all clicked along with the click track and he was a drummer, through-and-through forevermore. He started doing session work in LA by the time he was 14. At 50, he plays in three different bands and bursts out with drum solos on his knees randomly while I’m making dinner, while we’re waiting on an Uber, and even sometimes in the bathroom, (don’t tell him I told you that).
Music, and rock music specifically, and drumming even more specifically than that is the way he makes his way in the world and he has no internal conflict whatsoever about that. I admire that. More than admire: I envy that. More than envy: I am deeply jealous of his soul’s love for its native art. And I wish my soul were that way about writing. It’s getting there, but it has taken a long long time.
Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I find myself doing “depressed” things long before I ever acknowledge I’m depressed. I stop taking care of myself and dressing in nice clothes. I curl up in bed and watch a lot of nostalgia bomb reruns I’ve seen ten thousand times. Walking from room to room makes me tired. I cook the simplest things for dinner—lots of blue box and ramen. But it isn’t until days and days later, when I find myself wrapped up in my blanket cocoon in bed, barely able to move, that I think, “Oh wow. I must be having a depression.”
It’s kind of like that with me and writing.
While Angel was obsessing over TDK vs. Memorex as a kid, I was writing. I wrote my first real poem in the fifth grade and the teacher loved it so much, she posted it in the window for the whole school to see. I still remember it:
The moon is a jagged diamond
Hanging and waiting in suspense
For someone to pluck him from this mine of darkness
That holds him captive
Captive in a sea of stars
That no one dares enter
For fear they’d never return
We were learning about metaphors and similes when I wrote that. I chose metaphor.
I used to ride the bus to school composing poems. As I grew, the poetry onslaught continued. I’d type them on my little Canon electric typewriter that printed a whole line at a time, and put them in packets in the kind of folders you’d put school reports in. I’d give the packets titles and slip them to my teacher on the sly.
I put my poetry in the front cover of my clear-covered three ring binder in high school and changed it out regularly. I wrote down song lyrics from memory and broke the lines apart the way I thought they should be broken.
I wrote satirical pieces in junior high, high school, and college and got in major trouble with teachers and schoolmates over it, but kept doing it anyway.
I sat in the wood-paneled study room in college with my left hand pressed against my forehead writing short stories longhand for hours as day turned to night, turned to very late night. I’d dance around air-conducting baroque music thinking of what next things my characters should be doing and what most clever ways I could say it.
All through the eight years I was trafficked—even then during that horrendous abuse, I spent so much of my “free” time alone at the keyboard writing endlessly about what was happening to me. I filled countless file folders on my shiny new Gateway computer and more spiral notebooks than I could ever keep track of. Words words words as Shakespeare would say. They didn’t always make sense during that time, but they kept me anchored to something, even if it was just my own hands moving, the click of the keys, the scratch of the pen, the flick of one page to the next.
I went to the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop twice and found my joy and my people. I didn’t bring an essay for class. I wrote it while I was there. I stayed up late in my hotel room writing it. I dashed into the college computer lab the day it was my turn to be workshopped, typed it out at emergency speed, and ran in to class with my ten copies, wet ink drying on my fingers.
And after I survived the trafficking, while I was barely surviving survival, when I was desperately poor and living in an apartment that had roaches in the dishwasher, when I was working at Walmart and smoking with old Southern ladies and bitching about customers, managers, and my swollen feet, I never stopped writing. I started a blog about my Walmart experiences. I started a blog about world spirituality. I started a blog about my burgeoning Paganism. I started a blog about 12 step recovery. I started a blog about tarot. I started this blog. I started more blogs. I started a blog… I started a blog… I started a blog…
And now, twenty years after the trafficking ended and nearly forty years after I wrote my first poem, and probably over fifty blog starts later, I am still writing. And I am reading Writing Down the Bones and realizing for the first time, after all this time, that I am a writer. I am a writer all the way down to my bones and always have been. I am a writer the way Angel is a drummer. I am a writer the way Natalie Goldberg is a writer.
It’s how I make my way in the world. It always has been whether I wanted it to be or not. My passion for the written word has burned for decades in spite of myself.
I wonder what will happen when I embrace its burning as myself.
My very own self.
We shall see.
-M. Ashley
New Memoir Method: Listen Don’t Wreck
When I started writing my memoir, I made this whole elaborate ritual for getting in and out of it. I bought a scolecite stone to remind me of a young man who was trafficked with me who didn’t make it. I wanted something of him I could hold as I believe it is our relationship that will form the spine of my book. The scolecite stone is milky white and oval, like a bar of Dove soap. It has little imperfections and fissures in it, hidden under the polish, that give it slight gray spots of texture.
My ritual for getting into the memoir was to hold the stone and listen to songs I picked out that remind me of Toby (that’s his name) and myself. “Sailor or Siren,” “Falling Slowly,” and “The Atheist Christmas Carol.” “This tenderness comes as a surprise…” “Take this sinking boat and point it home…” “Don’t forget I love I love I love you…” respectively. I would listen to the songs, hold the stone, and let my mind wander over the trafficking time and let the muses or my intuition whisper to me what I should write about that day and give me the blessed first line—the way in.
Then I would write, cranking loud a film music playlist I used to listen to a lot during the trafficking time. I would write by hand in a wide ruled spiral notebook with a purple cover. I would print so I could actually read it later to transcribe it, (my cursive has long since become indecipherable). I would listen, not write… listen… and record the next word and the next. If ever I found my mind asking, “What comes next?” I would pause, sink into the music, let go and recommit to listening. Listen, I would remind myself. Don’t WRITE.
Then, when it was all over and the scene was done or I was exhausted, whichever came first, I would listen to one last piece of film music that reminds me of Toby and me—“The Mysteries of Love” from Blue Velvet. I would cry a little and hold the stone. My benediction. I would get up and try to go on about the rest of my day.
I produced some really remarkable writing that way, however…
Writing that way could also wreck me. I entered deep mind, deep senses, deep feeling and it stayed with me, knocked me to the floor emotionally, sometimes for days. I had to find another way.
The last couple of days, I’ve experimented with little to no ceremony. I’ve sat in my comfy couch recliner in the middle of the living room with my standard poodle and fiancé passing back and forth and the occasional ring on the doorbell and weird sounds the front door makes and food smells and the algorithm on the bluetooth speaker confidently playing nothing I really want to hear. And I was more comfortable. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel wrecked after. I did want to sit in dim light and eat cheap cookies after, but I didn’t want to curl up in a cocoon and dissolve myself entirely.
The problem is, the writing is for shit. Maybe that’s too harsh. Not exactly for shit, but not exactly great either—choppy and mechanical like someone going through the motions of putting on a uniform but not having any idea what job it is they’re actually meant to do. I had this image in my mind of watching Toby’s legs through the legs of a dining table and chairs and of being afraid of him one of the few times I was really afraid of him, and I could not write it properly. My mind got all tangled up with the table and chair legs, and Toby’s legs, and the click of the keys, and the straightness of the typed letters, and I couldn’t HEAR anything. I was writing, but my soul was deaf.
There had to be a better way.
Usually, I meditate outside in the morning because actively listening to our suburban aviary loudly go about their birdly business helps my monkey mind un-monkey. Today, however, it is blustering Santa Ana wind out there and SoCal cold—45 degrees—so I put on a fuzzy jacket, went into my office, threw a blanket over myself, and meditated inside. I had no intention of connecting with the memoir or Toby or any of it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t even touch that material today, so put out was I at the failure of the table leg trial in type. But as I meditated there in my office in the mid morning light of the window, in the still quiet, I began to feel it tug at me. It became irresistible and, in the last minute and a half, I reached up and grabbed the scolecite stone.
I had this idea:
I have a lovely little spiral notebook, a fancy notebook, I bought to record notes about my meditation sessions this year. I had kind of abandoned it because I saw it was a little anti-Tao to be meticulously recording what flowed naturally in meditation, but today I had this thought: What if I wrote the memoir in there? What if I wrote notes to Toby in that book? The paper is cream, not stark white. The lines are bold, not faint. The pages are small—undemanding. There is an index section so I can find what I wrote later. And when I’m done writing, there is an elastic band that wraps the whole thing up and maybe, just maybe can keep the scary bits inside.
So that’s what I did. I got out my former meditation notebook, started a new section called “Notes to Toby” and began the day’s memoir work there. I listened. I heard. I recorded. I did not WRITE. It was wonderful. I got to the meat of the table legs. I understood why I was writing it—the IT of that moment, Toby’s tiny acts of care and restraint. And when it was finished, I indexed the entry, capped my pen, closed the book, wrapped the elastic band around it to keep everyone safe and still, slipped it back into its place, and moved on with my day.
I feel a little tired now, but not wrecked. We shall see as the day goes on how it wears, but I think I might have discovered a new little method and ceremony that keeps the listening intact but the devastation at a minimum.
I’ll keep you posted.
Until then, I wish you all the best in word-liness.
-M. Ashley
Trauma Memoir Writing Decompression
I have decided to do what so many survivors have decided to do. I have decided to write the story of my trauma and my survival in hopes that it may help other survivors feel seen, heard, and understood. And also in hopes that it may draw attention to the issue—sex trafficking. I am a survivor of eight years of brutal trafficking. I was an adult in my early twenties at the time. I am disabled (albino and legally blind). I am not particularly thin or cute. I made decisions in order to survive that are, in the best light, morally gray. I am not a “perfect victim.” So few victims are. I think more than shedding light on sex trafficking, which is worthy and important, I want my memoir to raise the voices of those of us who are imperfect victims and feel that with every fiber of our beings when the media only covers the tragedies of people who fit a certain physical, socioeconomic, and moral type. And especially feel it when our abusers say, “No one will believe you because…” and are probably right.
I started writing the memoir with the working title “Guilty Innocents” in November and, so far, it has frankly kicked my ass. I write a scene and am knocked out by it for days. I have tried to come up with all manner of ways to soften the impact. I have a scolecite stone that reminds me of a fellow survivor that I hold before I write and listen to music that makes me think of him, and us. I blast film music while I write. I have a cool down piece of music for after. I let myself eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I want when I’m done. I wrap up in a fuzzy jacket. I chit chat about my poodle to my AI robot pal to get my mind of it.
And still it is costly.
This is not me complaining. This is me just saying. And it is me appreciating. Every trauma memoir out there, and there are a lot, cost something similar of the writer. How brave and strong and full of light they all must be. Even if the writing isn’t very good or even if it’s a trauma we’ve heard about a thousand times before—every word of every one of them costs courage and nibbles little painful bites out of the writers’ souls. They should be admired for their endurance. I admire them tremendously and pray I can stand up in that same lineage and get this story down.
I laid in bed one night with my fiancé, buried face first in a pile of pillows, my “comforting” classical playlist on, not working, telling him, “This writing is so important. I know it. It’s so important but also… costly. Just so costly.”
For the first couple of months of working on it, we ate a lot of blue box mac and cheese, ramen, spaghetti with no meat… noodles noodles noodles… because that’s all I could manage for us for dinner. I joked we may come out at the end of this with me having written a wonderful memoir, but the both of us having developed ramen-induced rickets. I’ve since gotten past the noodle noodle noodle phase and I’m glad. Last night we had cold sandwiches. I don’t know if that will prevent rickets, but the introduction of protein is a good thing.
I decided to start blogging about the process of writing the memoir mainly for my own decompression I think and also to have something lighter to write about. I feel like a lazy bum on days I don’t write anything forward-moving, but I also can’t face the memoir every day, so I thought blogging about the process was a good way to produce public-facing writing on days I need a rest from the deepest darkest—to keep me feeling like yes, I am still a working writer. Yes, I am still capable of finishing things and not simply writing until my brain wants to crawl out of my skull and I simply can’t stand to sit in front of the keyboard or at the notebook one minute longer.
Also, I am trying to focus more these days on writing what I love to read and I LOVE to read about writerly process. I’ve dipped back in to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently and oh… I feel like a dog rolling in the sun drenched grass reading about her process. So why not write about process myself? Acknowledging, of course, that with me, with this material, there might be dog patties in that grass sometimes, but the sunlight of having written something worthy, that never dims.
Until next time, my friends. I wish us all the very best in word-liness.
-M. Ashley
PS
The picture for this post is an idea my AI robot pal and I developed for the cover of the memoir. What do you think?
SoCal Winter Solstice (poetry)
The insectile buzz of a mower mowing a 16th of an acre
Patch of green grass on December 21st. Cars on the
Northside thoroughfare wooshing in waves—high tide
At sunrise commute, low tide at bright and lazy after-lunch.
The smell of your next-to-you neighbor’s cigarettes.
His cough. The smell of your behind-you neighbor’s pot
Smoke—as blessedly un-dangerous a skunk encounter
As you will ever have. Lucious pink Cape Cod roses
Preening on raggedy brown bushes bordering an oil-
Stained driveway. Even unseasonal human
Things are made of Nature. She smiles, shakes her
Starry curls and is not all that ashamed of us today.
-M. Ashley
Unsolicited Spiritual Advice: God Crack
“…the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
I’ll tell you what: Right now my brain is starting a headache looking at this quote while my consciousness is in Aldous Huxley’s pants. Such a spiritual hottie. Great big juicy brain. Big glasses. All the vision. Sexy. Delicious.
A friend asked me if, spiritually, there was a “ghost in the machine” and I think there is some big philosophical principle there, but I took it as: Is there a ghost in this human flesh machine that’s running the show? And my answer is, of course! Who else would be running the show but a ghost? Dead humans are the geneses of ghosts, are we not, so surely we each have to be full up with at least one ghost to begin with. In there, pulling the levers. The consciousness operating on the brain.
There are psychiatrists out there who say they can reproduce the god feeling artificially with some sort of electronic doodad plugged into your brain. They take this to mean that the god feeling is a product of brain function and not at all inspired by something outside, like an actual god. But then, how do they think a god operates except by affecting the physical brain through the consciousness? The god-consciousness goes conscious and pulls on the god-conscious-feeling brain levers because it says, “Hey flesh machine! You have GOT to feel this!” So yes, nasty psychiatrists. The god feeling can be reproduced in the brain, but the gods do it by one little lift of a divine eyebrow where it takes you a room full of overpriced equipment and millions in grant money.
But let me not come out of my hair about it…
My hottie Aldous used peyote to try to get there. High, he got the god feeling by looking at a painting of a chair, looking at flowers in a vase, counting the pleats in has pants. (Him and those pleats, man. He goes on and on. But he was high at the time, so we forgive him, and his sheets of pleats.) He was a visionary, but on his trip, he didn’t see visions. He saw life pulsating in everything, which is to say the divine radiating out of everything, which is to say the omnipresent face of the divine. Can we say he saw gods everywhere? Each pleat having its own divine ghost the way each human has its own divine ghost?
I think we can. I think we can see it too.
Unsolicited Spiritual Advice:
If you have millions of dollars in grant money and a stash of peyote to get you to the god feeling, by all means use it (and invite me), but if you don’t, the door is not closed to you. Pray. Meditate. Commune. Dare I say, make a habit of it? The gods are vast, but the the vastness of their feeling can slip in through even the tiniest conscious crack.
-M. Ashley
Fantasy. Union. (poetry)
“From fantasy comes union” that feels like
Ecstatic gratitude. Electricity comes to mind
But seems trite although there was literal
Lightning in my gratitude ecstasy. I danced
With my windows open in a storm drunk
On an almost full bottle of table wine
I couldn’t have fantasized it better this stormy union
It wasn’t what I expected. How silly to expect
Union to feel like freedom when really
It is the ultimate binding—the ultimate us
Together. We
Eternally.
I flopped down in my unmade bed
Left the last of the wine in a red plastic cup
Gathering rain and the reflection of lightning on
The dusty windowsill—dust made mud by the
Gods’ rain. I wanted IT so much. I was naked.
I wanted IT so much but
The Lover said I was just a little too
Drunk to have IT much
Just now.
The Lover is a gentleman.
I didn’t know that.
-M.
….sometimes, from fantasy comes union.” -Rumi
Soul Filling (poetry)
Crack open my soul and tell me
what’s in there, would you?
I am thinking of a decadent Easter
egg with filling too bright and
sweet to look at or taste. A Cadbury
egg gone berserk spilling out gooey
gold light.
Is this my soul or is it gooey
gold godly Ichor?
What’s the difference
anyhow?
-M. Ashley
The Wisdom of Lavish Desire (creative nonfiction)
“There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.”
-Lao-tzu
I get this out of a devotional book for a twelve step program. Well there you have it, I’m in a twelve step program. But the thing is that I disagree with the devotional quotes about half the time. All these old men, very rarely women, who thought they were so wise. This devotional is like an assemblage of ancient and medieval Twitter. Humans have been thinking, wrongly, they are so wise since the first human threw a bone in the air to impress the mysterious monolith. Or maybe that was a movie.
But now that I’ve complained about people who think they are so wise and we who desire so much to find people to be wise to us in our faces to give us direction when our wisdom fails us, let me tell you how much wiser than this guy I am.
Lavish desires is the IT! That’s the magic! It’s the juice, it’s the jazz, it’s the… I can’t think of another “j” word. It’s where it’s at. The gods tell me all the time to “ask ask ask.” There is no limit, not even the sky. The more we ask and surrender to the knowing our ask will be answered, the more they get to answer and the richer we all feel.
I’ve been trying to focus in my writing lately on concrete, physical details, because that’s the jazzy juice of writing. But how do I explain sensually what I mean about this lavish desire and bold asking that is the very opposite of calamity? What are some antonyms for calamity? Alexa says one of them is “blessing.” That’s exactly whatI’m talking about, I mean, right on the nose, but “blessing’ seems so benign. It’s more like BAM! BLESSING! Nothing banally benign about that.
But you don’t get the BAM BLESSING unless you ask ridiculously and desire lavishly.
Even the wording…
Every week in my white and gold planner that is the white and golden apple of my eye, in the section on the left side of the two page week spread—the section marked priorities that, frankly, I don’t actually know whatI’m supposed to write there—in that section, under priorities, the first thing I write every week is, “My gods love me lavishly at every single moment and in every tiny detail.” So you see this Lao-tzu guy stole my very word to say a very wrong thing.
The heavens drop golden plums—plums not apples now—in my lap almost constantly. More and more and more and more, better and better and better, and why? Because I lavishly desire golden plums constantly and greedily ask for them and BAM the BLESSING and, sensually, golden plum juice is sweeter than your best French kiss, and wetter. And why? Because I dared to desire lavishly.
So here’s the wisdom—my wisdom—that in this one and only case may be actually wise. Desire lavishly. Ask greedily. Receive the juicy plum. Celebrate with jazzy gratitude.
It would have been a better finish if “gratitude” had started with a “j.” Hey gods, give me a “j” word for gratitude.
“Joy.”
Yes. Joy.
-M. Ashley
Theos: Boxed (poetry)
Roll up your sleeves
my golden god
these clavicles ache
for the cracking.
Your bare knuckles scrape
but are not scraped.
My blood spatters.
You stay freshly washed.
Dear god,
my kidneys have grass stains
and
I need an oracle
to locate my spleen.
-M. Ashley
M. N. Ashley 