THE SELF
TEN TIMES TEN
LISTS, Lists, lists . . .what do lists tell you about people? What they wanted to get at the store? What they needed to do today? Take ten lists of ten and see what you can find out. One hundred items making SELF:
10 places to scatter my ashes:
1. Off the balcony, across the “O” in the Shakespearian Theater in Cedar City, Utah
2. In Logan, Utah: on the track in front of the bleachers at Logan High School
3. Across my mother’s back yard, probably in the mint.
4. In the aspen grove behind my house in Leadville, Colorado
5. At temple of Sinawava, in Zion National Park
6. Beside our fence in Jackson, Wyoming at the foot of the Tetons
7. At new Mountain Avenue Theater Complex, at Ashland High, at the base of the fly tower.
8. Across the bricks at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
9. Inside my Aspen grove in my back yard in Ashland
10. Off the cliffs of Sorrento into the Bay of Naples.
10 Favorite songs
1. Jesu , Joy of Man’s Desiring - J.S. Bach
2. If I had a Million Dollars - The Bare Naked Ladies
3. Morning - Edvard Grieg
4. The Minstrel of the Dawn - Gordon Lightfoot
5. Perhaps Love - John Denver and Placido Domingo
6. The Dark Night of the Soul - Loreena McKennitt
7. Christian Island - Gordon Lightfoot
8. A Summer Song - Chad and Jeremy
9. Here, There and Everywhere - The Beatles
10. "Hosanna" from Requiem - Andrew Lloyd Webber
Ten Daughters
1. Lezlie - A Shakespearian Scholar
2. April - An Artist, An Actor
3. Laura - An Independent Firm Contractor
4. Laurence - A Writer, An Actor
5. Sarah - An Ecologist and Geologist
6. Kate - A Writer, An Imaginer
7. Ellen - An Actor and teacher
8. Rachel - A Midwife and Douala
9. Jocelyn - A Medical Student
10. Becca - A Social Worker and Nurse Practitioner
Ten Things I Love That Define Me
1. Otters
2. Ivy
3. Aspen Trees
4. Shakespeare
5. Celtic Harp
6. Poetry
7. The Dance
8. Traditions
9. Mountains
10. Pink
Ten Places/Things of Magic
1. Standing in the dark, in the wings of the theatre, while the overture plays, waiting for the curtain to go up. Your heart gets in your throat and beats double time to the music. It is an anticipatory, expectant, absolutely lovely feeling. Something similar, though not quite the same, can be felt from the audience by a mother in red shoes, waiting for a daughter behind the footlights. You get the same beating in your throat, but when the dancing starts, you have to stay in your chair.
2. The Temple of Sinawava, Zion Canyon, Zion National Park, Utah. Big medicine comes down the narrow canyon on the night wind. My sister, my nieces, my daughters and I lie on the soft, fine sand by the river’s edge, looking up at the glory washed cliffs and a golden moon tinted sky studded with sharp, bright stars. The whipping spirit wind blows over us easily, accepting us as it does the rocks and the river. We belong.
3. Three Ultra Sound screens; one in Bangor Maine, one in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, one in Woodbridge, Virginia. Each discloses a tiny creature, who when measured in the apparatus cross hairs, is revealed to be just the right size, placed firmly in the correct position; with a minute jumping bleep, bleep, bleep . . . the magic flicker of a beating human heart.
4. From the cliffs of Sorrento, Italy, a ripe, full moon paints a butter soft ribbon of gold across the bay of Naples. I stayed up all night and watched it go from one side of the bay to the other. It is said that it was from here that the sirens called to Odysseus, but I was silent all night and so was the moon.
5. At the top of Independence Pass in Colorado one is about as close to the sky as one can get on earth. Between Leadville and Aspen, at 16,000 ft, the pass is only open a few months a year. From the summit, you can see for miles in every direction, the air is thin and rarefied, the ground is covered with snow and grassland tundra, and for a few weeks every summer, thousands of tiny wild flowers. When the sun goes down the sky looks as though it has caught fire and all of creation is burning: crimson, tangerine, carmine, peach, rose, gold, vermilion, maroon, apricot, and cardinal red. When I was nineteen, my cousin and I stayed up at the summit until all the tourists had disappeared; then we waited for sunset. We cranked up the stereo on the car . . .an 8 track tape of Cat Stevens singing “Oh Very Young,” as I recall . . . and danced up and down the paths in the blaze of the sunset. Upon arriving in Aspen, sometime during the next few days, we heard, for the first time, John Denver sing “Rocky Mountain High” with the words: “Colorado Rocky Mountain High, I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky,” and we looked at each other and said, “exactly.”
6. My mother’s house is a most magic place, this is agreed by everyone who has ever been there. It is filled with the magic of childhood; the enchantment of books; the sorcery of beauty and wrapped all around with sapient spells of love. There is also this eternal mystery about it, this something that no one has ever quite figured out, something mystic, something deliciously mysterious and magical. Every child that walks in there feels it and somehow thinks, “I just might be the one to figure it out . . . whatever it is . . .” But of course, no one ever does.
7. The front room - any of many different front rooms - very early Christmas morning. The stockings are filled and Santa has left the children’s presents laid out on their chairs, presented just perfectly. I am savoring three expressions of surprise and delight that will come with the sunrise, squeals, gasps. Once again, I have managed to get each one just what they asked for as well as something for each one that is totally unexpected . The lights of the Christmas tree are soft and a little blurry; I’m very tired and quietly, bone-deep happy.
8. “Inside this Wooden O.” The smaller one in Cedar City, Utah, where I was born. The bigger one in Ashland, Oregon, which is now my home. Both are modeled on the original in London. So much magic has passed through these that it is sunk deeply into the wood, yet if you touch that wood, during the day, you will not feel the magic shuddering under your fingers. It sleeps until it is time for it to come alive. When the trumpets sound, when the lights go up, it will wake and begin to glow. Then it will simmer and sing for a few precious hours while the stars wheel over head, in a night breeze that smells there of sage, here of pine.
9. High Country Crocus. At the top of the world everything is white for many months out of the year. There is snow on the ground from September to June and by May one begins to wonder if anything living and green will ever grow again. But it does, like magic, like a promise, as soon as a little piece of grass is visible in the dripping from the eves, the crocus will start to sprout. I used to say that the reason they were called crocus is because they came up right under the eves, opened their little yellow beaks and said “croak us!” and all the snow slid off the roof and croaked them. And that was usually exactly what happened. Still. They were the first green things to be seen bravely peaking their heads above ground after months and months of unbroken whiteness. The magic of returning life, the magic of spring. Unchanging. Unfailing. My little snow angles, after months of living in white would come shrieking, “Green! Green! There is Green coming through the snow!”
10. Words. With a yellow legal pad in front of me, or the back of a piece of scratch paper, or my fingers on the keys of my faithful Adler typewriter, or the keyboard of a computer . . . I write a sentence that is almost. It kind of goes around a corner, but doesn’t quite make it. It is halting, it is frozen, it is wobbly, faltering, broken, fragmented. Then I look at it again, I think it, I taste it, I wiggle it, I smooth it, I do who knows what to it, I change a few words, I move a comma, a erase something, I add something, I move something and suddenly it flows, it fits, it harmonizes, it tallies, it lines up, it WORKS. Eureka! Banzai! Hallelujah! Magic.
Ten things I wouldn’t have missed on a bet
1. Breast feeding
2. Roller coasters
3. Waterfalls, fountains, rainbows
4. My husband’s hands
5. Narnia, Middle Earth, Prydain, Hed
6. The smell of the desert after a rain
7. My children’s laughter
8. The secrets of swans
9. Gordon Lightfoot, Loreena McKennit
10. The light that lit the alabaster and loved a rose bud into blossom
Ten Delicious Words
1. Soothing
2. Lengthen
3. Liquid
4. Lyric
5. Mellow
6. Moon
7. Cello
8. Whisper
9. Soft
10. Bliss
Ten Favorite Movies (only cheating slightly)
1. Franco Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet
2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream - (Rupert Everett in Glitter, Stanley Tucci as Puck)
3. Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing
4. Franco Zeferelli’s . . .OK it’s a tie between The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet
5. The Turning Point
6. Ferris Buhlers Day Off - Better Off Dead (A Person should not have to choose)
7. A Chorus Line - The Company (Again . . .)
8. Noises Off
9. For Rosanna
10. Elizabeth
Ten Favorite Books (Cheating Quite a Lot)
1.The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
2. The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Chronicles of Narnia (Seven) C.S, Lewis
4. The Riddle Master of Hed Trilogy Patricia McKillip
5. The Pridain Chronicles Lloyd Alexander
6. The Woodwife by Terri Wilding
7. Eloise by Kay Thompson
8. Six By Seuess by you know who
9. Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estes
10. Motherhood: Journey Into Love Edwina Peterson Cross (well?!)
Ten Favorite Quotations:
1. “Follow your bliss” Joseph Campbell
2. “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. The, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire” Teilhard de Chardin
3. “Go Slowly, Breathe and Smile” Thich Nhat Hanh
4. “There was a star danced, and under that was I born” William Shakespeare.
5. "Being with real people who warm us, who endorse and exalt our creativity, is essential to the flow of creative life. Otherwise we freeze. Nurture is a chorus of voices both from within and without that notices the state of a woman's being, takes care to encourage it, and if necessary, gives comfort as well. I'm not certain how many friends one needs, but definitely one or two who think your gift, whatever it may be, is pan de cielo, the bread of heaven. Every woman is entitled to an Allelujia Chorus" Clarissa Pinkola Estes
6. "Alles Verganglich ist nur ein Gleichnis" - "Everything that is is but a metaphor." Goethe
7. “There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Red (Walter Wellesley) Smith
8. If my virtue be a dancers virtue
And If I have often sprung with both feet
into golden-emerald rapture
And if it be my alpha and Omega
that everything heavy shall become light
Every body a dancer
and every spirit a bird:
Verily, that is my Alpha and Omega
- Nietzsche
9. “Oh it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.” The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
10. “Go that way real fast, if something gets in your way . . . turn.” Savage Steve Holland.
LISTS, Lists, lists . . .what do lists tell you about people? What they wanted to get at the store? What they needed to do today? Take ten lists of ten and see what you can find out. One hundred items making SELF:
10 places to scatter my ashes:
1. Off the balcony, across the “O” in the Shakespearian Theater in Cedar City, Utah
2. In Logan, Utah: on the track in front of the bleachers at Logan High School
3. Across my mother’s back yard, probably in the mint.
4. In the aspen grove behind my house in Leadville, Colorado
5. At temple of Sinawava, in Zion National Park
6. Beside our fence in Jackson, Wyoming at the foot of the Tetons
7. At new Mountain Avenue Theater Complex, at Ashland High, at the base of the fly tower.
8. Across the bricks at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
9. Inside my Aspen grove in my back yard in Ashland
10. Off the cliffs of Sorrento into the Bay of Naples.
10 Favorite songs
1. Jesu , Joy of Man’s Desiring - J.S. Bach
2. If I had a Million Dollars - The Bare Naked Ladies
3. Morning - Edvard Grieg
4. The Minstrel of the Dawn - Gordon Lightfoot
5. Perhaps Love - John Denver and Placido Domingo
6. The Dark Night of the Soul - Loreena McKennitt
7. Christian Island - Gordon Lightfoot
8. A Summer Song - Chad and Jeremy
9. Here, There and Everywhere - The Beatles
10. "Hosanna" from Requiem - Andrew Lloyd Webber
Ten Daughters
1. Lezlie - A Shakespearian Scholar
2. April - An Artist, An Actor
3. Laura - An Independent Firm Contractor
4. Laurence - A Writer, An Actor
5. Sarah - An Ecologist and Geologist
6. Kate - A Writer, An Imaginer
7. Ellen - An Actor and teacher
8. Rachel - A Midwife and Douala
9. Jocelyn - A Medical Student
10. Becca - A Social Worker and Nurse Practitioner
Ten Things I Love That Define Me
1. Otters
2. Ivy
3. Aspen Trees
4. Shakespeare
5. Celtic Harp
6. Poetry
7. The Dance
8. Traditions
9. Mountains
10. Pink
Ten Places/Things of Magic
1. Standing in the dark, in the wings of the theatre, while the overture plays, waiting for the curtain to go up. Your heart gets in your throat and beats double time to the music. It is an anticipatory, expectant, absolutely lovely feeling. Something similar, though not quite the same, can be felt from the audience by a mother in red shoes, waiting for a daughter behind the footlights. You get the same beating in your throat, but when the dancing starts, you have to stay in your chair.
2. The Temple of Sinawava, Zion Canyon, Zion National Park, Utah. Big medicine comes down the narrow canyon on the night wind. My sister, my nieces, my daughters and I lie on the soft, fine sand by the river’s edge, looking up at the glory washed cliffs and a golden moon tinted sky studded with sharp, bright stars. The whipping spirit wind blows over us easily, accepting us as it does the rocks and the river. We belong.
3. Three Ultra Sound screens; one in Bangor Maine, one in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, one in Woodbridge, Virginia. Each discloses a tiny creature, who when measured in the apparatus cross hairs, is revealed to be just the right size, placed firmly in the correct position; with a minute jumping bleep, bleep, bleep . . . the magic flicker of a beating human heart.
4. From the cliffs of Sorrento, Italy, a ripe, full moon paints a butter soft ribbon of gold across the bay of Naples. I stayed up all night and watched it go from one side of the bay to the other. It is said that it was from here that the sirens called to Odysseus, but I was silent all night and so was the moon.
5. At the top of Independence Pass in Colorado one is about as close to the sky as one can get on earth. Between Leadville and Aspen, at 16,000 ft, the pass is only open a few months a year. From the summit, you can see for miles in every direction, the air is thin and rarefied, the ground is covered with snow and grassland tundra, and for a few weeks every summer, thousands of tiny wild flowers. When the sun goes down the sky looks as though it has caught fire and all of creation is burning: crimson, tangerine, carmine, peach, rose, gold, vermilion, maroon, apricot, and cardinal red. When I was nineteen, my cousin and I stayed up at the summit until all the tourists had disappeared; then we waited for sunset. We cranked up the stereo on the car . . .an 8 track tape of Cat Stevens singing “Oh Very Young,” as I recall . . . and danced up and down the paths in the blaze of the sunset. Upon arriving in Aspen, sometime during the next few days, we heard, for the first time, John Denver sing “Rocky Mountain High” with the words: “Colorado Rocky Mountain High, I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky,” and we looked at each other and said, “exactly.”
6. My mother’s house is a most magic place, this is agreed by everyone who has ever been there. It is filled with the magic of childhood; the enchantment of books; the sorcery of beauty and wrapped all around with sapient spells of love. There is also this eternal mystery about it, this something that no one has ever quite figured out, something mystic, something deliciously mysterious and magical. Every child that walks in there feels it and somehow thinks, “I just might be the one to figure it out . . . whatever it is . . .” But of course, no one ever does.
7. The front room - any of many different front rooms - very early Christmas morning. The stockings are filled and Santa has left the children’s presents laid out on their chairs, presented just perfectly. I am savoring three expressions of surprise and delight that will come with the sunrise, squeals, gasps. Once again, I have managed to get each one just what they asked for as well as something for each one that is totally unexpected . The lights of the Christmas tree are soft and a little blurry; I’m very tired and quietly, bone-deep happy.
8. “Inside this Wooden O.” The smaller one in Cedar City, Utah, where I was born. The bigger one in Ashland, Oregon, which is now my home. Both are modeled on the original in London. So much magic has passed through these that it is sunk deeply into the wood, yet if you touch that wood, during the day, you will not feel the magic shuddering under your fingers. It sleeps until it is time for it to come alive. When the trumpets sound, when the lights go up, it will wake and begin to glow. Then it will simmer and sing for a few precious hours while the stars wheel over head, in a night breeze that smells there of sage, here of pine.
9. High Country Crocus. At the top of the world everything is white for many months out of the year. There is snow on the ground from September to June and by May one begins to wonder if anything living and green will ever grow again. But it does, like magic, like a promise, as soon as a little piece of grass is visible in the dripping from the eves, the crocus will start to sprout. I used to say that the reason they were called crocus is because they came up right under the eves, opened their little yellow beaks and said “croak us!” and all the snow slid off the roof and croaked them. And that was usually exactly what happened. Still. They were the first green things to be seen bravely peaking their heads above ground after months and months of unbroken whiteness. The magic of returning life, the magic of spring. Unchanging. Unfailing. My little snow angles, after months of living in white would come shrieking, “Green! Green! There is Green coming through the snow!”
10. Words. With a yellow legal pad in front of me, or the back of a piece of scratch paper, or my fingers on the keys of my faithful Adler typewriter, or the keyboard of a computer . . . I write a sentence that is almost. It kind of goes around a corner, but doesn’t quite make it. It is halting, it is frozen, it is wobbly, faltering, broken, fragmented. Then I look at it again, I think it, I taste it, I wiggle it, I smooth it, I do who knows what to it, I change a few words, I move a comma, a erase something, I add something, I move something and suddenly it flows, it fits, it harmonizes, it tallies, it lines up, it WORKS. Eureka! Banzai! Hallelujah! Magic.
Ten things I wouldn’t have missed on a bet
1. Breast feeding
2. Roller coasters
3. Waterfalls, fountains, rainbows
4. My husband’s hands
5. Narnia, Middle Earth, Prydain, Hed
6. The smell of the desert after a rain
7. My children’s laughter
8. The secrets of swans
9. Gordon Lightfoot, Loreena McKennit
10. The light that lit the alabaster and loved a rose bud into blossom
Ten Delicious Words
1. Soothing
2. Lengthen
3. Liquid
4. Lyric
5. Mellow
6. Moon
7. Cello
8. Whisper
9. Soft
10. Bliss
Ten Favorite Movies (only cheating slightly)
1. Franco Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet
2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream - (Rupert Everett in Glitter, Stanley Tucci as Puck)
3. Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing
4. Franco Zeferelli’s . . .OK it’s a tie between The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet
5. The Turning Point
6. Ferris Buhlers Day Off - Better Off Dead (A Person should not have to choose)
7. A Chorus Line - The Company (Again . . .)
8. Noises Off
9. For Rosanna
10. Elizabeth
Ten Favorite Books (Cheating Quite a Lot)
1.The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
2. The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Chronicles of Narnia (Seven) C.S, Lewis
4. The Riddle Master of Hed Trilogy Patricia McKillip
5. The Pridain Chronicles Lloyd Alexander
6. The Woodwife by Terri Wilding
7. Eloise by Kay Thompson
8. Six By Seuess by you know who
9. Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estes
10. Motherhood: Journey Into Love Edwina Peterson Cross (well?!)
Ten Favorite Quotations:
1. “Follow your bliss” Joseph Campbell
2. “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. The, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire” Teilhard de Chardin
3. “Go Slowly, Breathe and Smile” Thich Nhat Hanh
4. “There was a star danced, and under that was I born” William Shakespeare.
5. "Being with real people who warm us, who endorse and exalt our creativity, is essential to the flow of creative life. Otherwise we freeze. Nurture is a chorus of voices both from within and without that notices the state of a woman's being, takes care to encourage it, and if necessary, gives comfort as well. I'm not certain how many friends one needs, but definitely one or two who think your gift, whatever it may be, is pan de cielo, the bread of heaven. Every woman is entitled to an Allelujia Chorus" Clarissa Pinkola Estes
6. "Alles Verganglich ist nur ein Gleichnis" - "Everything that is is but a metaphor." Goethe
7. “There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Red (Walter Wellesley) Smith
8. If my virtue be a dancers virtue
And If I have often sprung with both feet
into golden-emerald rapture
And if it be my alpha and Omega
that everything heavy shall become light
Every body a dancer
and every spirit a bird:
Verily, that is my Alpha and Omega
- Nietzsche
9. “Oh it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.” The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
10. “Go that way real fast, if something gets in your way . . . turn.” Savage Steve Holland.
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