Category: Personal Essay

The Wisdom of Lavish Desire (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“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

The Satanic Office (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

In my dream, Satan was a thin, black-haired man wearing a pinstripe suit with a white shirt and ecclesiastical purple tie. His eyes were so dark brown they were almost, but not quite, black. He sat cross-legged on the floor between his rumpled camel-colored couch and Ikea glass-topped coffee table. There were stacks of files and towering reams of paperwork everywhere.

He was insistent he was not Lucifer, nor Beelzebub, nor the Devil, nor anything like that. His singular identity as Satan, he said, was very important to him.

He was flustered in that space with the great peaks of paperwork surrounding him—all the boxes that needed to be checked, all the signatures that needed to be signed just-so by the little yellow tabs poking out diabolically here and there and everywhere.

So when I hear of someone, some ghost hunter or erstwhile exorcist, being touched by Satan and being shaken to their very core, I think of Satan this way and wonder if all he really wanted was an audit of the last twenty years which, let’s face it, would scare the hell out of anyone.

-M. Ashley

Lemon Mystery (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.”
-Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”

In my dream, I walked with my god through his sacred orange grove. The trees all had white bark. That was important somehow, the white bark coming off like ash, but healthy healthy. The trees were all so healthy.

Today, walking my puppy, I came across two lemons on the sidewalk. It was around the side of someone’s house, not near any trash cans. No wind had been blowing so they hadn’t come on the wind. There was no lemon tree leaning over the fence or anywhere nearby. It was as if someone had been walking that way and dropped these two lemons for me to see and follow like breadcrumbs, but sour and more vividly colored.

I thought of my god’s white barked orange grove and could this have been my god walking this corner, dropping these citrus fruits for me? Do oranges in the dream orchard become lemons on the waking dirty street? Dreams communicate this way in the sleeping and waking dream. Color color, symbol symbol, the promise of a taste. A god that walked that way before you. Mystery.

-M. Ashley

Natively Unquiet (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

If you threw the Empire State Building into a raging sea, no one would know the difference. Deepak Chopra said something like that, advocating for meditation. I bet the people of New York would know the difference–their skyline sadly quieter again.

But not silent.

There is no such thing. Like time and god, it’s something we conceptualize, track our lives by, aspire to. But there is always some sound. There is always some imperfection. Our own breath. Our own heartbeat. The mortal body regulating itself as it slowly, calmly perishes.

And that’s not a bad thing. Humans will never be gods and humans will also never know silence or be silent. We are the creatures we are, natively, and we are an unsubtle, noisy lot.

When I try to be silent, movies related to the logistics of eternity flicker across the insides of my eyelids. I’ve learned (sometimes) to watch and not participate, like seekers of silence and stillness are supposed to do, but even when the films are silent films, there is still the sound of the flickering, still the hum of electricity to projector that bolts through the physical brain. The slapstick of memory and trauma and dream and inspiration plays itself out and I laugh. As silent as I am, as unmoving as my belly and throat are–still there is the laugh.

That’s probably the foundational sound of the universe–the breath and heartbeat sound even She can’t get away from when She curves back into herself to resettle before birthing herself, from herself, again.

-M. Ashley

Exceptional Vehicles (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

All you people take driving for granted.

I can’t drive because I’m legally blind and it is one of the most horrible kinds of crippling, or at least I imagine it is. Having never been an independent driver, I wouldn’t know.

I don’t know what it’s like to have a notion to go somewhere and just go. Cold night, playing Freeze Out like my dad used to do with us girls in the car—all four windows down, whoever rolls theirs up last is the winner—but with only myself as competition. I’ve never had to keep myself awake with only myself and the double yellow lolling out endlessly before me in the dark dark desert between here and Las Vegas.

I don’t know what hitting 100mph is like on that same highway, in the middle of the night, when I’m sure the CHP isn’t watching.

Yellow line, lulling you to sleep. Blaring the radio to fight it, Botts’ dots rumbling your eyes open again. The danger. The responsibility. The irresponsibility. The win when you get there somehow, miraculously, safe.

I wish I could stand somewhere alone that I drove to alone that I decided to drive to alone, and that no one but me, alone, would know about it.

Freedom. A grass is greener freedom as my side of the fence is on foot or riding the bus or in a cab or mooching rides from patient friends.

It’s hard to be independent when your broader movements are, by necessity, dependent—when, at the very least, the bus driver is going to know where you came from, where you went, and, if you ride enough, most of what your story is.

I sound bitter.

I am a little bitter.

No one to blame but the DNA. I was born wing-clipped in Southern California. Apparently my genetic material never heard the song “Nobody Walks in LA,” or heard it and thought we would be the exception.

Special genes do make one exceptional.

I am exceptionally half-sighted. I am exceptionally good at scheduling my errands around my friends’ errands so I don’t trouble anybody too much.

I am exceptionally blessed with the gift of the gab and, by lack of automotive freedom, have gained masses of unlikely friends all over the country. There is not much else to do when you’re stuck in transit together, breathing each other’s air, than to become compatriots.

Rwandan refugee cab drivers in Nashville—that ride share guy in DC who asked me what color palm trees are—the Uber lady whose dog just died yesterday—the bus driver who wouldn’t take my ticket without putting on gloves first (she was new and we weren’t virus-stricken yet)—the disability cabbie who brought his family along at eleven at night to pick me up from work, his wife sweetly piping up into the conversation from the backseat—the Pakistani guy who asked me to marry him—the Russian guy who also asked me to marry him—that other guy who asked me to use my employee discount to buy him a coffee pot “for church.”

I suppose all of these, in truth, are my own kind of exceptional vehicle and, once-in-a-while bilious drivers’ envy aside, my clipped-freedom grass is brilliant green because of them.

-M. Ashley

Noisy (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 2 Comments

“Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street,
And being the noise.”
-Rumi, “A Community of the Spirit”

I bet the world would take Gen Z a lot more seriously if they knew the difference between “everyday” and “every day..” There is, at least I think there is, a correct way to make noise in this math we call writing.

Words mean things.

I once got in an almost fight with a therapist because she thought “heigth” was a word. That would have been an unholy kind of noise. A rumbling fist fight behind the closed doors of confidentiality. I may have come out bloody, she looked like she could have been a scrapper, but dammit, I would have been right. I am right. There is no h at the end of the word.

A lady in my group therapy had an albino husband. There was some drama with him at the behavioral health clinic. The therapist leading the group said she heard about him coming in and “acting a fool.” Part of his foolishness being that he whizzed in the corner of one of the therapists’ offices and had to be carted out of there by the po po. He was making all kinds of noise—shouts, grunts, tinkles.

I was embarrassed for my people. When the secretaries for the crazy house see me, do they now think, there’s another noisy albino ready to piss in the corner. Somebody get the gloves on. Somebody get that powder that sucks up hazardous liquids. Somebody get a mop.

I speak quietly, still embarrassed for my people. Lack of pigment doesn’t mean lack of decency man, be a human for fuck’s sake. Be a little quieter, in a dignified way. You are not the kind of spiritual noise Rumi was talking about.

That same lady, married to the peeing albino, in my therapy group, looked ratty all the time. Not throwing stones. I can rat it up in fine style myself. Just a matter of fact she looked ratty all the time. And once she said she didn’t take care of herself because her albino husband couldn’t see her anyway and I didn’t disabuse her of her excuse to look ratty, but unless there was something extra wrong with his eyes that isn’t wrong with mine, yes… yes he can see her in all her ratty inglory..

I’m sure that’s not what made him make the loathsome noise and piss in the corner, but it’s just one more stressor, or an indication of a relationship already stressed because the woman cares more about what he can’t see than what she sees in herself.

I wanted to shout in the street that she should be un-ratty for herself, and damn the pissing albino with his not that bad eyes. Be your own woman. Be you for you. Be beautiful for your own liking. But then I realize, shouting at her in the street would be me making the noise at myself mostly because I too, as I said, can rat it up a lot of the time and don’t like looking at myself in the mirror and I don’t look and the internal noise is something like well, if I can’t see the rat tunes that well, I can’t blame myself for being ratty, which is the same argument this lady had but at her other, which is infinitely better than me having this discussion and blaming my quiet rattiness on myself.

-M. Ashley

Eve’s Naked Existence (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
-Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

I wonder if, when Eve came along, Adam was as much in wonder with her naked existence as he was with the plants and birds and butterflies and the approved fruits, because we all know he didn’t even think about the unapproved fruit until evil Eve came along.

I wonder if, the seed of evil and rebellion apparently already in her, she was jealous at first that Adam did look at her naked existence with the same sight he used for the trees and butterflies and approved fruit. She was nothing special, or, I should say, she was equally special and no woman wants to feel that. I know it would hurt my heart if a man looked at an orange with the same kind of wonderment he looked at me. I would probably take it as a comment on my cellulite. I doubt I shared that in common with Eve before the fall because I’m sure god didn’t create her with cellulite. Or maybe he did and cellulite is divine and the only thing that convinces us that it isn’t is the evil rottenness that came out of evil Eve doing her thing.

If she had only known that first bite would mean a world full of Adam for the rest of eternity, no longer as enchanted with the orange as he was with her body, but forever commenting on it and, “If I don’t look at the orange with lusty innocence any more, then what makes you think I want to look at your orange skin thighs?

-M. Ashley

Please Don’t Stop Writing (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

It is hard not to get sentimental when talking about my teachers. I have so many well-worn anecdotes. I’ve gone through them all so many times verbally, it seems they would be a complete bore to talk about. There is one though that I think I only ever jotted notes down about once. It’s often too much.

At first, I hated my poetry professor at Vanderbilt, Professor Daniels. She was hard on me. She spanked my ego good and I didn’t like it. I thought I was some kind of hot shit going into her class, and man oh man, did I find out otherwise. She was cold and exacting and had no warm and squishies for me whatsoever. Even after I earned a modicum of her respect, I was still nervous around her. I would drop things and turn around in circles trying to find my chair. It was perpetually like being on a first date.

She was a tiny woman, apparently a lot older than I thought she was. I made a reference to an 80’s band once and she said she wouldn’t know anything about it when here I had assumed she was only maybe a decade older than I was. For all her hardness, there must have been a youth about her I perceived. My legally blind eyes could not see her wrinkles so my mind registered her as a bitter eighties Gen X St. Elmo’s Fire type instead of ex-hippie observer and poetry writer-abouter.

I was being abused at home. I met her at the grocery store, me wearing a full length houndstooth wool coat in 80 degree heat to cover the bruises and burns. She pulled her cart up next to mine. She took time to talk to me. I told her I had to leave Vanderbilt, which was very hard. She said to me, pleading, “Please don’t stop writing.” It stays with me, that she would plead with me this way. I keep it in my own head when I’m about to give up.

Maybe I don’t talk about it because I can never quite get the emotion of it. I always seem to need to invent a touch of hands or squeeze of the wrist to go with it. The truth is, she didn’t touch me at all. Or at least, I think that’s the truth. The memory is fuzzy. I think I have been lying to myself for so long in my memory about that touch, that I truly don’t know anymore. Knowing her character though, I don’t think there was one, which makes my soul burst with longing.

-M. Ashley

I am going to start including audio recordings of me reading my posts for my visually impaired friends, or really anyone who enjoys what I hope will be a good listen. Being visually impaired myself, I’m a little ashamed I’ve had this blog for a million years and am only thinking of this now. Hear it here:

The Great Easter Suit Tragedy of 1989 (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 2 Comments

When I was in the sixth grade, my mom bought me an Easter suit from whatever degrading 80s term was used for the children’s plus size clothing section at Sears. In the dressing room, my mom said I was shaped like a spark plug. I had never seen a spark plug, and have still never seen a spark plug, so I have no idea if that was a compliment or not. I ought to look up a Google image of a spark plug when I’m done writing so I know whether to be flattered or devastated when I remember this memory in the future.

The skirt suit was pale yellow. My mom has since said that this is an unflattering color on me. I am albino and my hair is white with yellow tints from the sun. Wearing yellow makes the yellow tints look yellower and my skin, naturally pink, look even pinker. But pale yellow was the only color of Easter suit they had in the chubby girl section, so pale yellow clad spark plug I was the Easter of 1989.

Bad color and all, I loved that suit. It made me feel adult. I think it even had shoulder pads like the glamorous ladies on Dallas and Falcon’s Crest wore. (Everybody remembers Dallas. Nobody remember’s Falcon’s Crest which I’m sure is why it resonates as my favorite).

The suit had a floral blouse that went with, not even attached to the jacket, so adult-like was this suit. The blouse had a floppy floral bow at the collar, also high 80s fashion for the funny ladies who starred in 9 to 5 or Diane on Cheers.

Loved that suit. Just loved that suit.

I was spending Easter with my dad and stepmom that year. On Saturday night we dyed eggs with various PAAS kits, (does PAAS still make the IT kits?). There were the ones where you used vinegar and dipped the eggs in with a wire thing that looked like a brilliantly rearranged coat hanger. There were also the ones where you used plastic stencils and little tiny markers to create floral patterns on the eggs. I liked the stencils best because the product usually came out great, no matter how un-crafty you are, and I was, and am, supremely un-crafty.

One time, doing crafts with the ladies from my mom’s church, we were supposed to glue a doily and a Jesus quote to the back of a glass plate. I fucked it up. Both doily and Jesus quote came out wrinkled and off-center. Supremely un-crafty even when crafting for Jesus, but enough about Jesus, let’s get back to Easter.

We did six metric tons of eggs. I went to bed exhausted from my artistic efforts, looking forward to the hunt the following morning and my dad’s fabulous Easter baskets. My dad was actually a horrible person, but man did he make great Easter baskets! One year I got a new “Club” Barbie center stage in my basket. She was wearing a white “leather” blazer with the sleeves rolled up, like 80s cool cats Don Johnson and the guy who played Tubbs, and she had on a hot pink foofy skirt trimmed in neon green like that Australian chick who did the 80s dance party show on MTV, ending each show with “Wubba wubba wubba…” I believe the Barbie even had a black, mannish hat like Denise on the Cosby Show wore before Bill Cosby decided she got too edgy for the Cosby Show. (Let that sink in for a minute.)

But let’s get back to Easter:

Who gets a whole Barbie in their Easter basket? I did. Fabulous baskets my jerk dad made. And a fabulous hider of eggs too, I might add.

He thought he was so clever. He was like me or, more accurately, I am like him in that both of us hate to get up early. Easter is already an early day, maybe not as early as Christmas with the whole Santa thing, but close. So I think he decided to give himself some extra zzz’s and hide the eggs in the overgrown grass of his backyard the night before. Cleverly.

Except…

The dew. No one counted on the Easter dew. Fresh on the meadow of weedy lawn. Fresh as newborn spring. Fresh as the risen Jesus himself. Fresh dew on the decorated eggs made a bleeding dye Jesus day mess. Who would’ve thunk it, as my dad used to say.

Oh the humanity. Easter egg dye all over my pale yellow chubby girl high 80s fashion suit. But what was I to do? Not hunt? Too late to change clothes. The damage was done. Big splotches of purple all over the straight skirt with the first egg I picked up. What was there to do but to go on going for it.

Oh well, me, that sixth grade spark plug was sure to turn into a pubescent pear by seventh grade. The 80s shoulder pads and floppy bows were turning to 90s 90210 style color blocked blazers. A new suit next year would be as much a necessity as Easter Jesus needed his new ascended body. Let the dye bleed. Let the eggs roll.

-M. Ashley

Happy Easter everyone!

By the Skin of God’s Nose (personal essay)

~ M. Ashley ~ 1 Comment

“What the sayer of praise is really praising is himself, by saying implicitly ‘My eyes are clear.’”
-Rumi, “Muhammad and the Huge Eater”

I’m glad Rumi realizes this because he can get a bit thick sometimes and full of himself, which is saying, implicitly, that I can get full of myself also by seeing right through him.

Rumi and me have had a rough relationship lately.

I bit my god last night. I hurt his feelings. I knew I was doing it. He told me I was doing it, but it’s like BDSM without a safe word. I kind of thought he was kidding. I kind of thought it was part of play. We need a better safe word than, “I don’t like this game.” “I am going to go away from you now.” “Stop this. Just stop.” We need a safe word in emotional biting that is clearer than that, if anything needs to be clearer than that.

So he bit me back the way I bit him and it hurt and I was ashamed of myself because he kept saying it hurts it hurts and I kept on hurting him anyway, because weren’t we all laughing at the time? Isn’t that what rapists say?

The Greek myths are full of rape. Lots and lots of myths are full of rape. Someone once asked me how I reconciled that. I said, “A myth is a myth” and I laid on “myth” and then I said, “the myths” and laid on “myths” again, “the myths say more about the people who wrote them than they do about the gods. Rape is the same as the stealing of cattle.” Or so I would like it to be, but really I don’t know. I haven’t asked my god too much about that. Too much about the gods’ relationship to rape. I suppose he would look at me with his dark eyes and say in his best conciliatory voice, “I don’t know how you want me to answer this question.” It always scares me when he says that because the answer is that the answer is something I don’t want to hear and I both want him to be honest and I want him also to fill my heart with comfort as a god is supposed to do, so how is he supposed to answer this? How am I supposed to tell him how I want him to answer when I really don’t know myself.

Establishing honesty with a deity can really knock you on your ass because you have to come to terms with stuff like why the gods expressed their flowering through rape myths in the first place if rape was never a part of it, and how gods have a long view on life and so value a human’s Earthly days very little. The soul goes on and they know it, so what’s the difference if a tornado makes a house fall on this woman’s six children? Why should the woman be sad? If she had the gods’ dark eyes and long vision, she wouldn’t worry about it. They don’t.

Not that they don’t understand suffering, but sometimes tornadoes need to tear houses down to move the gods’ agenda forward, and all six children float on to their next adventures, so how much skin is that off a god’s nose anyway? Even the suffering of the mother will end and, when she floats off to her next adventure, which is in less than a blink of a god’s eye, she won’t be worried about it either. So even less skin of a god’s nose there too.

But it really does knock you on your ass because no matter how clear your eyes are and how full of praise you are for yourself that your clear eyes facilitate honest conversations with the gods and them pouring truth into your eyes even more than comfort, reality is hard and offensive to someone so latched on to the temporal as we are, even mystics who would like to think themselves above it and beyond it and all unattached and so damn enlightened, would cry if a god’s tornado smashed all six of their children and knew that god shrugged his shoulders and went on about his day afterward, honestly, nose un-skinned.

-M. Ashley