BAP Blog

If you haven't heard...
the Best American Poetry Blog brings poems, commentary, responses and all manner of poetry conversation to the internet. I've only briefly scanned a page to find Maxine Kumin' poem and Jenny Factor's comment on the Antioch Residency... notes and a poem resulting from Richard Garcia's lecture in particular, which I missed.

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In Memorium

I celebrate all the creatures that have come under my care, filled me with their joyful spirit and then passed on. In the last two years, the list has increased to an unfortunate number.

Haiku is the most recent loss. He was my birthday gift seven years ago, purchased at Jim's Pet Depot and hand-selected because of his ebullient, sociable nature.

A week before Haiku died, I found the seven perfectly-evolved bodies of the three-week young dwarf hamsters. Sport, their momma, was in the nest with four of her litter, either denying their death or hoping to revive them. Three others were found at various spots in their cage. The eighth, a runt, had died and was cannibalized by his siblings a week before.

During my first Antioch residency two summers ago, I lost Orange Kittie. As events later proved, the man in the house behind me was trapping all cats in the area and having them picked up and disposed of by Animal Control. Beautiful, placid, yellow-eyed Orange Kittie made the mistake of wandering into his yard and pursuing the scent of the bait. She was a wonderful companion, who loved luxuriant naps from the roof overhang and who learned to look-not touch her new friends, Tanka and Haiku. She was a kind listener and a soft mold of warmness in my arms.

The next summer, I lost Manx. This was heartbreak multiplied into infinitum.Once again, the neighbor appears as the culprit. Though the knowledge came much too late for me to recover my darling Manx.

Manx was a Winn Dixie giveaway cat. The moment I held her, she was mine. A true calico and a true short-tailed manx, she was my delight, upstaging all the other animals in my devotion. She melted in my arms, graced me with exuberance and curiosity and hypnotized me with her perfect beauty.

Manx was a flurry of play, a boldness of color with eyes brighter than glass and a face that simply twanged my heart strings. I loved Manx. I still love her and believe her spirit remains alive. I wish to believe her little body is romping in a wide-open, sun-filled play ground.


So many more...

I realize that accepting the care of animals is a responsibility of life-sized proportion. All these lives require more than supplying the basics of food, shelter, warmth. There's seeing the slight change in coat or a lassitude or just a difference in temperament that may imply illness. That's a responsibility that relies on intuition and awareness. And although my animals do speak to me, I have to be listening. And every critter that comes into my shelter also nests in my heart. There's no way to measure the aftermath when that love is gone. But it is there.

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Goodbye Haiku!

My darling yellow-faced parakeet Haiku, died on May 30, a week after first taking him to the vet.

His death came after weeks of struggling for breath, and on the same morning he awoke drenched in some wetness, and called feebly to his partner, Tanka. It came after a series of gran mal seizures, while I held his twisting form. It came from the liquid injected into his chest by that same vet, cracking his chest plate in a final cruel crushing before he died.

Haiku was a bright, beautiful, cheery character of a budgie. Although the smaller of the two, he was the protector of Tanka and did his job faithfully. He endured her peevishness and her greediness at the feeder. He answered her frantic calls when she was lost in the night or when my cat sneaked into their room ready for a little pouncing and play.

Haiku was a sweet sweet little bird and I miss him.

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The Ching on Mentoring

30 The Clinging, Fire
Guiding, Directing (an Ideology)
From guidance comes direction






Today's I Ching fling swing with added interpretation: "LI : glowing light, spreading in all directions; light-giving, discriminating, articulating; divide and arrange in order; the power of consciousness. The ideogram: bird and weird, the magical fire-bird with brilliant plumage."

From guidance comes direction
This is what one looks for in a mentoring relationship - "guidance" - the sage advice from a veteran, a fillip of insider info, a dash of mystery so that the mentee can proceed with her own decision, just enough withheld to make the mentee's own knowledge, experience, gut the motivating cause.

Guidance is soaked in an alchemy of the subjective and objective. It's that "glowing light." It proceeds from the mentor's wealth, her possession of data and circumference, the holistic eye that is both shrewd and compassionate. It cancels out self interest and focuses on the mentee's best interest. It is "discriminating." It acts to arrange, to suggest best arrangements in light of the mentee's capacity, drive and most importantly, desires.

A relationship means reciprocity. So what obligations fall on the mentee?

The mentee is charged with claiming a need, asking for guidance, billeting her deficits, showing her strengths. She presents herself to the mentor in a revelatory series of moments, tears away facade and lets go of dissembling. This kind of exposure reveals more than the cold stuff: intellect and achievement and bluster. It slips away from hierarchal taboos. This revelation defeats shame and can only occur when the mentor accepts the whole person.

The mentor cannot guide without first having an inclusive understanding of her mentee. She can't guide without a goodwill investment. She can't guide without a load of accurately targeted insight. She can't guide without the mentee's revelatory information. She can't divine a direction if the mentee does not paint a map of her ambition.

The mentee's responsibility is akin to taking the first step off a cliff and hoping the next step or the one after or the one after, will land her on fertile ground. She takes that first step when she chooses to trust her mentor. As a mentee, she is obligated to peel away the blemishes and embarrassment, and to shine a light on her accomplishments.

Is this an inherently one-sided relationship while presenting itself as mutual? Both parties give and receive. And yet, in her delivery, the mentee becomes an open chest - all the soiled and sacred, the queasy and the quests - are presented to the mentor in a gift of unilateral proportion. Does the mentor deliver the same to her mentee? Of course not! To be human is to be fallible. And to be a mentor requires a persona of infallibility, a quantity and quality of wealth that the mentee presumably does not possess. Or has not actuated. To be a mentor also demands a certain aloofness. That separation is what sustains the mentee's trust in her mentor's aura of superiority: a superiority in skills and wisdom rather than in any other human trait.

But that trust is where the mentoring relationship exhibits one-sidedness.

Here are a few definitions for "trust":

1. [n] the trait of trusting; of believing in the honesty and reliability of others.
2. [n] complete confidence in a person or plan etc.
3. [v] allow without fear

Notice how trust, whether a noun or verb, is predicated on such absolutes. The mentee must have "complete confidence" in the mentor. "Honesty" is essential. Again, in extending trust, the mentee takes the precarious step into the void. That step will find either solid ground or a steep fall. One step is not enough though. Trust derives from a succession of steps, a repeatable experience in the honesty and reliability of the mentor.

The mentor doesn't engage in trust so much as in presenting herself as trustworthy.

Yet, how is that proven? Especially how is that demonstrated to a mentee whose nature turns on the opposite edges of faith and doubt? There has to be a composition, a tangible piece of craftwork that turns visions into substance. It could be as simple as a plan, an outline of objectives, something that demonstrates continuity and progression. This is not about assuaging the fear of the mentee - well yes it is - but by using practical tools. The visible beats out the assumed. Monsters are put to sleep not with prayers but by the conclusive fable, with the finality of the nursery rhyme. Prayers are another form of trust. They do not prove reliability.

At what point does this mentoring relationship conclude?

It can last for years, building and evolving into transformations. It can last up to the moment of an achieved objective. It can disintegrate when reciprocity disappears. It goes away when the mentor loses faith or the mentee loses trust.

A mentoring relationship with vitality is a protracted blend of the amorphous and the perceivable.

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