Teresa R. Funke's Blog: Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life, page 5

What Does It Mean to Be Home for the Holidays?

I can’t explain why, but every year, the first Christmas song that enters my mind is, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Maybe it’s because I’ve spent over 30 years writing about and studying World War II, and my imagination travels back in time to the lonely soldiers on the frontlines for whom that song was written. It was recorded in 1943 by Bing Crosby.

Maybe it traces back to a childhood memory shortly after my parents divorced in which my mother graciously invited my dad to join us all on Christmas Eve at the extended family gathering, securing for me the belief that my dad, though he was no longer living with us, would always be home for Christmas.

Maybe the song stuck in my head during the years my children entered college and I was never sure how often I’d see them or how much they needed me, but I knew they’d be home for Christmas.

Who knows, really, why that song always gets to me.

This year, my Idaho friends and family asked, as they always do, if I was coming home for the holidays, meaning back to Idaho. My local friends asked if my grown children were coming home for the holidays, meaning to this house in which we raised our kids. Meanwhile, I fantasize about spending Christmas in a beautifully decorated bed and breakfast in Vermont.

This time of year, my art always seems to leave me a bit, too. I blame it on the Christmas chaos, but it’s also due to the year-end melancholy that has visited me for as long as I can remember: the inevitable looking back over the past year and feeling both delight and awe at the things I accomplished, and frustration or bewilderment at the things that did not come to fruition; the realization that I’m getting older and so are the people I love; the wondering if I have enough energy and will to go on creating all the things I want to in the next year. I don’t enjoy the melancholy, it feels out of character for me, but I no longer wish it away. It’s familiar to me now, like an old friend, like home.

Home is where the heart is, we say. And it’s true. In some moments, my heart is in my childhood, and home is my grandmother’s house surrounded by my aunts, uncles, and cousins passing presents to each other. I’m so grateful those memories will always be a part of Christmas for me.

On other days, my heart is in our current house as I hang my children’s stockings and remember all the Christmas mornings when my kids rushed half-asleep down the stairs to see what Santa had brought them. I’m so grateful those memories will always be a part of Christmas for me, too.

On other days, my heart travels into the future, to my children’s homes (if I’m lucky enough to be invited) or to that bed and breakfast in Vermont, and I’m so grateful for all the Christmas memories that are yet to come.

In the last line of the song, the soldier says, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” So melancholy, don’t you think? That’s okay. Not every Christmas is happy for everyone, and we need to leave space for that too.

Home is not a particular place, it’s not just the people who inhabited those spaces, or the scenery that surrounded it. Home is all the places and spaces where you feel and have felt loved and valued, safe and whole. It’s memory and myth, tradition and change, longing and hope. Like that soldier, it’s something you carry with you, not someplace you go.

May you all feel safely home for the holidays, in whatever ways you celebrate them.

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A Grandmother’s Lessons on Being – Revisited

This post first ran on December 8, 2019

Yesterday, I was having a drink with a friend and some of her friends. A couple of the women were talking about their grandkids and all the ways they try to be of service to them, which is wonderful, but sometimes exhausting and time consuming.

I blurted out, “I don’t know. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. She never cooked special foods for me or made me clothes or took me anywhere. Heck, we rarely left her home. I only remember one time she ever bought me something for no reason. She was a very quiet person, and English was her second language, so she rarely gave me advice or chatted with me about the things I enjoyed. She never came to any of my school events or activities. Yet I adored her.”

This revelation was followed by a moment of silence, as I think we all processed what I’d said. I’ve wondered for a long time why, given the circumstances, my grandmother was so important to me. Why she still is, though she’s been gone for almost 30 years. I admired her for the challenges she’d overcome in her youth and her tenacity as an immigrant to America. Though she never said, “I love you,” I knew she did. My fondest memories of her are of quiet moments. Sitting together on the porch swing with her hand in mine. Slow, observant walks around the block just to notice what had changed since yesterday. Watching her pat out tortillas for our lunch or helping her sort the good pinto beans from the bad (which is actually a pretty meditative experience).

I realize now my grandmother was a master of “living in the now.” And some part of me, growing up with stress and challenges of my own, must have craved that. I used to think Grandma didn’t teach me anything specific. She was a great seamstress, but never taught me to sew. She refused to teach me Spanish, though I asked her often. She never taught me how to cook, even. She left that to my mother. But now I realize she taught me something much more valuable. She taught me how to be still, how to notice, how to just be in the presence of someone you love.

So maybe it’s not what we do for others, it’s how we “be” with others. Maybe what shows our love the most is just being present. Funny, how it can take a lifetime to recognize the lessons that really matter.

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The Only Gift You’ll Ever Need

Memory is a funny thing. This time of year, a particular memory always returns to me, and I have no idea why. It’s from December of 1988. I was 21 years old and studying for a semester at West Chester University outside of Philadelphia. My roommate, Nancy, invited me to her house for the weekend. We’d spent the day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, enjoying the holiday decorations and markets. That evening, after her mom had gone to bed, Nancy decided to decorate their Christmas tree. She put on my favorite holiday album, John Denver’s Rocky Mountain Christmas, and poured us a warm drink. As I sat in a comfy chair watching her hang ornaments on her tree, I was filled with absolute peace.

The persistence of this memory fascinates me. I long ago lost touch with that roommate, whom I only knew for four short months. I’ve never again returned to that part of the country. The memory has nothing to do with me, really. After all, it was her tree and her ornaments and her house. I have so many happy memories of Christmases when I was a kid or when my children were little. Hundreds of them, but it’s this memory that comes back every single year. Why?

Near as I can figure, it has something to do with the simplicity of that scene, and my role as observer. I had no responsibilities in that moment other than to be present to the music, the drink in my hand, and the stories my friend was sharing. It was she who had to mix the drink, and turn on the record player, and decide which ornaments to hang. All I had to do was close my eyes and feel the Christmas Spirit.

I think that memory has such appeal to me now because in the many years since that night, Christmas for me has become a list of chores. It has become a season to “get through” rather than “relax in.” It feels as if we talk about the “wonder” of the season, even as we orchestrate every moment. For women, especially, the responsibilities this time of year are enormous. The quiet moments are few and far between. Over time, we become the magicians performing the tricks rather than the audience members experiencing the magic. We know what’s in every present under the tree, we know what’s in every recipe that’s prepared, we know all the stories by heart. We go to sleep at night not with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads, but worries about what we might be forgetting.

I know not everyone feels this way about the holiday season. Call me Scrooge if you want. I’ll answer to that. But what I really wish I could give everyone I love this year, what I really wish I could give myself, is a season filled with nothing more than moments to just sit together with a cup of something warm in our hands, with soft music playing, and snow quietly falling outside the window, and the deep, tingly, magical knowing that we are loved, and we are safe, and that’s enough. It’s so much more than enough. It’s the greatest gift, perhaps the only gift, we’ll ever really need.

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A Little Rest is Required

This week I’ve been sick for the first time in two and a half years. I forgot how awful it is to be so achy you can’t get off the couch, and how achy you then become because you can’t get off the couch. For someone who usually has lots of energy and drive, it’s unsettling to feel so lethargic. And for someone who relies on her brain and her words for her work, it’s alarming to walk around in a sickness-induced fog.

It would be nice if at least something good could come from it all. How many movies have I seen where some famous artist takes to their bed and tosses and turns in a fever dream that later leads them to a great discovery? I haven’t found much evidence that ever really happens outside of Hollywood. I think I’ve had only one good creative idea in the past three days, but my throat was too scratchy to articulate it.

I missed an author event for which I was supposed to be speaking. And I had to move a couple of important meetings. Being one of those the-show-must-go-on types of creatives, I hate that I couldn’t kick this thing fast enough to show up when I should. But it turns out even a stubborn nature or the best intentions can’t will away the flu. Not even for someone who knows all the best get-better-quick tricks.

As if feeling sick isn’t bad enough, my inner critic has to make it worse. “I told you to wear your mask to that play. You have been pushing yourself kind of hard lately. Your husband has it, too, but isn’t nearly as sick as you. Why are you so weak?” I can fortunately shut her down pretty quickly, but it’s the worst kind of bully who kicks you when you’re down, don’t you think?

I may have brought this on myself. Last week, when I was perfectly well, I asked a musician friend of mine how musicians relax at all during flu season, knowing if they get sick, they’ll have to cancel a gig. He just laughed and said, “Oh, we don’t cancel. We sing with a fever, or when we’re sick to our stomachs.  The only time we cancel is if our voices are gone. But we usually have someone lined up to sub for us.”

If the universe thought that by asking that question, I was looking for an opportunity to test how I myself would handle such a scenario, it badly misunderstood me.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. I’m not even sure if I’m spelling words correctly at the moment. But so many of my friends are recovering from illnesses and surgeries and heartbreaks right now, leaning on the hope that soon they will feel better. And they will. So will I. In the meantime, we just gotta get through this. We have no choice. Our poor bodies require a little extra TLC, and our minds just have to deal with it. Our bodies will let us know when they’re ready to get back up and at ‘em. Until then, rest, my friends.

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Be in Awe of Your Own Work

I hosted one of my art salons last week, and our topic centered around the famous Martha Graham quote in which she talks about an artist’s work and says, “there is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through your action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist. . . ” She urges us all to “keep the channel open.”

It’s a longer quote, and a great one, because each time I read it, I pick up on different pieces. Lately, what strikes me about Graham’s message is how artists of all kinds are really co-creators. Our work is of us and not of us. It doesn’t come from us, it flows through us. There’s a mystery to its creation that we never do figure out, but we feel it when we’re in the “flow” or in the “zone.”

When I was a teenager, many people told me I had a gift for writing and should be a writer when I grew up. The implication, of course, was that the “gift” was bestowed on me by some outside source. Call that God, or the universe, or destiny, or whatever you like. So, early in my career, I gave up much of the control for my own journey. I worked hard, of course, to learn my craft, but all the while I was thinking, “If I’m meant to be a writer, it’ll happen. If not, it won’t.”

Later, I went in the opposite direction. I came to believe, “if it is meant to be, it’s up to me.” I doubled down on my efforts. I thought if I could just be disciplined enough to sit in my chair at a certain time, I could will the ideas to come. That’s what a real writer would do. That didn’t work either.

Over time, I started to understand what Graham meant. It’s a partnership, this art thing. It’s not about opening the channel, though, it’s about opening your channel, as my friend pointed out. Once you accept that everything you create is a co-creation, and that the “vitality” or “life force” or “energy” that Graham talks about flows through you and into the world in a way that is uniquely and authentically yours, you begin to appreciate and thrill in the collaboration.

I’ve come to realize over these many years that the single best thing about being an artist is that we get to be in awe of our own work! I’m sure that’s also true of people in many professions who are co-creating with the unknown. And the funny thing is, there’s nothing egotistical about that. Think about all the interviews you’ve heard with writers in which the interviewer reads a passage from their book or poem, and the author says, “I wrote that? I did? That’s pretty good.” How can we say our brilliance is all ours if we don’t even remember writing something?

Or the nights when everything is going wrong and the outside energy is all off, yet the actor surrenders to the chaos, opens a channel, digs deep into themselves, and winds up moving the audience to tears. In that moment, even the gods must smile.

I’m in awe of the projects I’ve helped bring into the world in this lifetime. I’m in awe of the joy and opportunities they brought to me and others. I’m in awe of how the ideas for my projects might come to me in a dream, or from a chance encounter with just the right person, or simply seem to drop into my head from out of nowhere. And I’m in awe of how those ideas then spark a passion in me that translates into action to bring them into existence in a way that is authentically me.

Keep your channel open, and with a heart filled with gratitude, give yourself permission to be in awe of your own work.

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Your Wild and Precious Life

I so enjoyed the new movie, Nyad. It’s the true story of Diana Nyad who, at the age of 60, decides to try again to complete the grueling 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat she first attempted 30 years earlier. How can you not be inspired by someone who pushes her body beyond what any of us would imagine possible, especially for someone of her age? And how can you not root for someone whose reawakened dream motivates and energizes her all over again?

Early in the movie, it is suggested that Nyad is inspired to consider the swim partly because she discovers a famous Mary Oliver quote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It’s implied that Nyad is feeling stuck and missing her “wild” younger self and so she recommits to her long-ago goal.

Enter the American obsession with youth, or in this case, reclaiming our youth, refusing to grow old. You’re only as old as you feel, we love to say. You can do anything you set your mind to, we love to believe. And Hollywood is always right there to remind us.

And it is inspiring to see someone of any age achieve a long-held, ultra-challenging goal. By the end of the movie, Nyad is shown on the circuit as a motivational speaker. She even brags about waking up her neighbors at 4:45 a.m. by playing “Reveille” on a bugle. She wants them to get up and get on with living, she says. Or at least, her version of living. Personally, I’d be pretty unhappy if my neighbor dared to wake me at 4:45 a.m. for any reason.

While I very much enjoyed the movie, I couldn’t help but think about that Mary Oliver quote. It’s from a poem called “The Summer Day.” Oliver was famous for her long, solitary ambles in the woods, her quiet life with her partner, her reluctance to do interviews. She was a deep observer of nature. In much of the poem, she is watching in awe as a grasshopper moves its jaws and eyes and snaps open its wings. In the very same poem, she says she knows how to be “idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.” And she asks what else she should have done?

It struck me as wonderfully ironic that the poem that supposedly spurred Nyad toward extreme sports stemmed from a poem in which Mary Oliver is saying that a quiet life of observation is a worthy life.

In other words, you are not aging “better” if you push yourself to extremes. You do not need to “get up and get on with life” at the crack of dawn in order to age well. You are just as worthy if you sit outside appreciating the breeze on your cheek and the birdsong in your ear as you are pushing your body to its physical limits.

You define what is “wild” in your precious life. When you hit 60, or 70, or 80, die your hair purple if you want, or let it go gray. Travel the world, or garden in your backyard. Go back to school, or read cozy mysteries all afternoon.

Diana Nyad felt most alive battling the waves in the ocean. Mary Oliver felt most alive idling on the grass on a summer day. As long as you’re living in this present moment and feeling alive, you’ll be my inspiration.

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Changed for Good

The musical, Wicked, is celebrating its 20th year on Broadway. It takes place in The Land of Oz, before the arrival of Dorothy, and tells the story of two unlikely friends, Elphaba and Galinda, who later become the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch.

So, I pulled up my favorite songs from Wicked to listen to them again. Isn’t it funny how you can hear a song many times over the course of several years and then one day, it really hits you? You hear it in a whole new way, and then it haunts you for days. That’s what happened when I listened to, “For Good,” which is the song sung before the two friends go their separate ways. I’ve been musing on these lines:

Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better

But because I knew you

I have been changed for good

It got me thinking about all the people who may have come into my life, as Glinda says, for a reason. To teach me something I needed to learn. Some of them were acquaintances or advisors, others were friends for a short time or still are, some were family members. But just as many, were people I’d hoped would be friends, but never really were. Or people I never considered a friend, but we traveled in the same circles.

Some changed me because they said something encouraging about my writing or aspirations at exactly the time I needed to hear it. Some changed me because they told me my dreams were unattainable, and it made me want to prove them wrong. Others changed me because they gave me great advice, sometimes even flippantly, as if they never thought I’d really do it. Others changed me because they tried to define how I worked (“a good writer writes every day”), and only in disregarding their advice did I grow.

I’ve mourned friendships I thought would last forever. I’ve had my heart broken. I often wish I could seek wisdom from friends and loved ones who’ve passed on. I’ve reconnected with old friends I never thought I would. I cherish my lifelong friends who continue to change me no matter what stage I’m in.

And I think about people who, to this day, I haven’t quite forgiven, partly because I once loved them or valued their friendship or sought their advice and they betrayed that trust. Or at least, I thought they did. And though I’m still angry with them, I don’t hate them. After all, because I knew them, I have been changed for good.

Of course, there’s two ways you could read that last line. And each holds truth. In the song, Glinda admits she is not sure it’s true that people come into our lives for a reason. It could be it isn’t really the person who leads us to grow. Maybe we sensed or knew we needed to change and looked for an opportunity to prompt ourselves. Maybe we turned some fly-by-night comment into a truth simply because we needed it.

It doesn’t matter either way. Putting ourselves out there in the world, loving and serving others, staying open, and feeling into ourselves, we can and will change.

Like the two friends realize near the end of the song, though, I do believe I have been changed for the better.

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Loving the World Through Story

A while back I was listening to a podcast, or maybe an NPR interview, I’m afraid I can’t remember. The guest speaker said something about stories helping us fall in love with the world again, and that’s all that stuck with me. Not the rest of the interview, not the name of the show, not even the name of the person who said it.

But I loved that expression so much—”stories can help us fall in the love with the world again”—because the world feels like such a heavy place sometimes, and the 24-hour news cycle never lets me forget that. It’s exhausting at times being someone who cares deeply.

But it’s stories that remind us why this troubled world is worth fighting for. It’s stories that connect us to the past and fire us up with the desire to create a better future. Stories pique our curiosity, which leads us to want to know more. They sometimes sadden or enrage us, which drives us toward action. They make us laugh, which draws us together. Stories can instill awe.

When I was a child, I didn’t understand the politics behind wars, but I heard the stories of those fleeing the bloodshed and understood that war was wrong.

Before I could read and question on my own, my parents read me stories, and I accepted that nature is alive, and animals have souls, and we are all tied together.

Before I could comprehend the words “heritage” or “genealogy” or even “traditions,” stories made me feel connected to my living elders and to the ancestors I knew only as sepia-toned photographs on the wall.

Before I came to love the study of American history, I came to love the stories of immigrants, and inventors, and great leaders of all kinds, but also to want to help “write” the wrongs of our past in the hopes we’d never repeat them.

Stories help me love this world even when it’s hurting, even when I’m hurting. And they help me face the hurt I’ve caused or been complicit to. Stories remind me that nature is beautiful but also deadly, that people are kind but also cruel, that history is sometimes inspiring and sometimes indefensible, that you can’t have love without pain, and that happy endings, even when they’re “earned,” are never the end, simply the beginning of yet another story.

Stories help us love the world again and it doesn’t matter if they’re real or made up, because all stories are real. And it doesn’t matter if they’re sweeping epics or tiny vignettes, if they’re told to crowds of gathers or one eager listener, if telling the story changes the world or changes only the teller. All stories help us love the world again, and all stories matter. Even yours. Especially yours.

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Living the Question

On a recent trip to New York, my husband and I visited the Morgan Library. The library’s permanent collection includes pages from a Mozart symphony dated 1782, a Rubens’ drawing circa 1613, and a Gutenberg bible dated 1454. As we and many other visitors wandered through J. P. Morgan’s study and library it occurred to me once again that art, in all its forms, is the one thing we as humans work really hard to preserve, protect, and value across thousands of years.

There is no current piece of technology that will last one thousand years, at least not in working order. Yet I’d be willing to bet the sketch some engineer drew on a cocktail napkin that led to its invention is guarded somewhere safe. There is no political party or system of government that will last unchanged for one thousand years, but the writings of its founders might. Over the past several millenniums, wars have redrawn borders, diseases have wiped out populations, colonizers have suppressed cultures, even some religions have come and gone. And yet much of the art remains. It is prized by creators and conquerors alike.

We build secret climate-controlled warehouses to protect it, we display it in museums and galleries and charge a fee to see it, we pass it down through generations of our families. Every holiday season, we sing carols based on tunes written centuries ago. Four hundred years after they were written, we still produce Shakespeare’s plays. We plan our vacations to include visits to architectural sites adorned in art.

And every time I have this thought, the irony hits me. The human race values art above almost everything else, yet it does not support artists. Many of the great artists, writers, and composers of the past millennium died penniless. Many more produced work that did not speak to them in order to feed their families. Countless others toiled away in jobs that left them so worn out they produced only a fraction of the art they might have made. So many artists never received even the recognition they deserved until long after they were dead.

I think this paradox will haunt me until I die. After more than thirty years of thinking about this conundrum, I feel no closer to the answer than I ever was.

There are days when I feel enraged by the injustice of it all, and days I laugh it off. There are days I remind myself money isn’t everything, and days I beg the universe to send even a small check my way. There are days I make art simply because I love to, and days I want to quit while I’m ahead. There are days I shake my fist at the gods and demand they stop playing favorites, and days I send up prayers of thanksgiving for all the blessings that allow me to produce my art.

On this day, I’ve decided that living the question is more satisfying than trying to solve it. Because in the past few thousand years only one truth has remained clear; art and artists matter.

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The Possible Impossible Dream

Last weekend, my daughter and I premiered our play, Wave Me Good-Bye, in New York! The night before, the weather channel issued a flash flood warning for the city, and our theater was located in a basement. I lay in bed fretting about that and all the other things that could go wrong with the production, thinking back on the countless hours of work that had gotten us to this point, pushing away memories of other events I’d planned that had not gone well, and trying to keep my anxiety down.

I recognized, too, that much of the “anxiety” was caused by excitement. This play was the fulfillment of a fantasy in so many ways and I couldn’t wait to see it on stage in front of a live audience. My friend’s words popped into my head, “I’m so proud of you for making your dream come true.”

For just a moment I wondered, is this really my dream? To lie here unable to sleep? Wouldn’t it be far better to go back to my days of sabbatical when I’d cleared my plate of everything I could that caused me worry? Wasn’t that really the dream? To be calm, to be rested, to enjoy free time, to feel less obligation and responsibility?

A line from the song, “Counting Stars,” by One Republic popped into my head. “Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.” And I laughed. It’s so like me to dip into the overly dramatic in order to find the humor in a situation.

There is one way to be present in the world: sitting on a chair with your back straight and your feet firmly planted on the ground feeling the breeze, hearing the birds, smelling the earth and flowers, and feeling supremely grateful for it all.

And there is another way to be fully present in the world: sitting in a creaky chair in a smelly old theater, locking eyes with your talented daughter, seeing your characters come to life on a stage, hearing the audience laugh and gasp and cry at exactly the right moments, and feeling supremely grateful for it all.

We were put on this earth to work and to rest. To take care of ourselves and to take care of others. To achieve and to appreciate. To worry and to rejoice. To love and to feel loved. And to find the beauty and joy in it all.

So today may you (and I) find peace to rest in order to dream and dreams to pursue that ground us.

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