Alison's Bench

She was one of the holy ones. We knew it as we sat in my living room week after week, hearing Alison Bermond read fresh new words from the many pages she'd filled during our thirty minutes of writing. The stories she wrote were like luminous quilts, passages of deep spirit and ancestral memory set against each other just so, not unlike the lovely fabrics she chose to wear. Her modest heart would look up after she read to our circle, almost apologetic or embarrassed, wading through the stunned silence as we let her language flow through us and then stuttered out some form of response. She sat rounded sometimes, bent like Ghandi, over-quiet, filled with a fierceness of belief, a heart large, overly-brave, exploring her life of devotion to beauty and the divine, to seeking a path to language and creativity, to piercing the truth.

There were so many surrounding her: spirit-brothers and sisters who held her with profound love. And we women of her writing group knew we held a special place in her life, and that our embrace was one of the things holding her up.

Just a year ago, she died. Alison Bermond, the author of two beautiful essays in Sisters Singing–and countless other poems, stories, essays hundreds of paintings and drawings–was gone before she and I could revel together over a stunning dream I had about her a week before she left. Her death was sudden–and of course it was not. She had lived with metastasized cancer for 18 months, longer than many, and had written achingly beautiful pieces about the place and metaphor of illness and cancer in our world. All of us sharing the path with her knew that her chemotherapy had taken a difficult turn. But still. She had begun to seem like that wild phoenix, always rising, and her last year had been joyful, with horseback riding classes and African dance, walking at the beloved ocean where she lived, spending time with deep friends, writing.

It seemed possible she could ride this last turn as well, squeeze more time out of the hour glass, though we’d recently seen her gaunt body and swollen ankles, and knew the signs. Still, even death that is not sudden nonetheless often is. So it was that one day she was out lunching with her wonderful step-mother who was visiting from London, after a blood transfer and a “good day." And the next she was asking to go to the hospital, that last place anyone ever asks to go. When she emerged a few days later she had begun that passage that awaits us all. Her last blessed hours were surrounded by her nearest beloveds and family in her home.

As fate sometimes arranges these things, our writing group had our regular meeting the day of her death. In our great grief we wrote, filling the page: about Alison, about death, about life. Then we went to stand around her body as final blessing. She was surrounded by candles, flowers, altars, incense, beautiful textures and cloths. She looked like the holy woman she had always been, and her face was serene. She had a small inward smile, as if she was acknowledging a pleasing private thought. She’d tripped that crazy portal, joined the light.

Again and again we learn this truth: we have to relinquish our most cherished beloved ones. One day, it is inevitable. They move farther beyond us on the path. And one day, we too will relinquish our bodies. When we do, the ones who love us will likely come together, in order to remember. So it was that a circle of twelve or so stood last Sunday at Seabright Beach–Alison's beach, just a block from her home–to bless a wonderful physical artifact erected in her memory. Not a tomb stone, not a building or an institution–but a place to sit. A place to gaze at the sea, to write a poem, talk with a friend, to think.

We were at Alison’s bench. And inscribed along the top was the following:

ALISON R. BERMOND
1953 -2007
With love from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the stars

Bob Jaffe, Alison’s beloved, had arranged it all, inscribing words Alison used to say to her daughter Serena. We gathered together and made a circle around the bench, situated at a sweet corner on Seabright Avenue across from a popular beach on a busy street. The day was bright like summer, and our circle stood drenched in warm sunlight. Behind us enterprising kids set up an old-fashioned lemonade stand, calling out LEMONADE! LEMONADE! so as to let the scores of people streaming by with chairs, towels, and beach umbrellas know there was sustenance to be found. An ice cream man on a bicycle trundled over towards the beach and up the road, twinkling his little song. Above us pelicans flew by, again and again in formation, so that they became a sign.

Two weeks before she died, I dreamt that Alison and I were at a spiritual retreat, and the leader, a small holy man from India, paired us to work together as a team. We stood before him, and he showed us the image of our beds moved together foot to foot, so that our sleeping spirits could dance in the night. We looked at him, a little shy, questioning how to proceed. He smiled reassuringly, held his arms out to touch our shoulders, then said simply, “You are to cherish each other. That is all.”

Cherish each other. Standing at the bench together, Bob told us that at first the City of Santa Cruz had said another bench was simply not possible, the park was full, it couldn’t happen. And Bob had told the Parks employee of his love and cherishment of Alison, his sweetheart. Then something shifted, suddenly there was an opening, a possibility, let me call you back–and after the paperwork and the waiting, it happened. We were there surrounding the bench, and Alison’s name was inscribed to the stars, under the great sky, before the sea.

In the circle we each spoke a small tribute of love. Some put flowers on the bench, some sang. Miriam Chaya, who had helped to organize the day, spoke of the pelicans above, soaring with Alison. I read the last stanzas of “Four Quartets” by T. S. Elliott, one of Alison's most beloved poems.

Then I read from “Tiferet,” one of Alison's essays in Sisters Singing. Raising my voice to be heard, I read her words among the cars spinning past and people calling to each other on the beach, the lemonade kids behind us making a sale, and yet another band of pelicans soaring by. As I read, I noticed that Bob had brought his cell phone over towards me. On the phone was Ed, Alison’s beloved friend and ex-husband, who had cared for her in her last year in the same way he’d loved her for so long: gently, fiercely, calmly, a stream of devotion so wide, clear and tender it had engulfed us all. Ed was in Brazil, half-way around the world–but with us too in that moment, listening as Alison’s words rang out into the air, piercing everything, raining down upon us, upon her bench, as benediction:

TIFERET

...I ask myself what is the place of beauty for me? Is it the arched windows of my house, the way the light moves across the floor, the vivid colors? This is only a part, like the sequined shoe of the tango dancer. The dance itself is something else. I know that for me it is the voice on the end of the phone trying to tell me the story and it is my ability to listen, to hear between the words, that vast silence.

Sitting at Sara's table at night, a candle burns. The traffic rushes past outside. We have eaten foods from her island, food from a culture that no longer exists, that perished in the ovens of Poland with those who died. Leeks and spinach bourekkas and her special rice with pinon nuts. She is telling me about her life, about the time when she fell into an abyss, when all seemed lost, all was taken away. She tells me about the men in her life who treated her badly, but mostly she speaks about what sustained her and continues to do so. The operas, the music, the poetry. How she and her husband would sit weeping together as they heard La Traviata, La Boheme. She is sharing these jewels of her life with me. I am in awe. We are laughing as we speak, even of the sadness. Time has vanished.

As I hear her words, I am at the feet of my mother and my grandmother and my great grandmother. I am drinking in the connection with life. The connection with this mystery, with the traditions of my people: the ragged cloth, the worn bag carried from place to place that holds the tallit and the tefillin. Blue velvet like a desert night embroidered with gold. I am here in this dark place that holds the trees at night glistening with fruit.

Inside I am a dancer. I wear a costume of black lace. I wear the strap shoes with a heel of the flamenco dancer, a shawl with red flowers. I move to the sounds of hands clapping and the voice of a singer who cries like the wind. I am in the heart of the meeting in the words not spoken but clearly heard. I am in the touch of the hand in that place opposite my heart where there would be wings.

Linda and Linda

Oh my, I am a bit surprised to be here–curled up warm under two sleeping bags in a tent cabin surrounded by redwood trees, pen and notebook in hand, at Big Basin Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We’ve just arrived in the forest, after the sprint of the past couple of weeks since returning home from our wonderful east coast Sisters Singing tour. Last Thursday we drove five hours to Chico for a sweet and intimate reading at Lyon’s Books, organized by the poets Linda Serrato and Lara Gularte. Since returning from Chico I’ve been a little akin to a crazy stalker in the night, tracking venues and singers and media and poets for the last portion of our tour. Email like a constant dance, those stolen phone calls with the key person, finally found, cell phone in the car, and my mind searching out the pieces of an intricate, beautiful and intriguing puzzle.

Now this. Plans made months ago for a two-day getaway to the mountains for Jean and I with our beloved friend Joyce. I look out the window to these ancient trees. In a moment we’ll walk through a stand of ancient thousand-year-old redwoods, their great old bark craggy and hairy and thick, and then our dinner outside under the stars. Oh this life.

If I sit very still by these great trees, I can remember the time I first heard Linda Serrato read her poetry. It was like a watery cascade of language and sound, Spanish sprinkled with English, and I didn’t try to translate from my rough high school Spanish–it was too beautiful for that, too buttery on the tongue and ear. Though some words did enter, like alma, luna, abuelita, that glimmered like diamonds as the song of her poetry flowed past.

It was early 1994, and we were at a poetry group at the wonderful poet/teacher Patrice Vecchione’s home. At the break I walked across the room to find the source of such a song. Linda Serrato: beautiful soul, a hint of melancholy in her beauty, a knowing of history, ancestry, and the gorgeous and broken voices of the Mexican diaspora whispering through the world. And as we talked, there came to us another woman, tall, thin, long blond hair, fair-skinned and almost ethereal. Her poetry was luscious, full of her three year old son Nathan, poignant pieces of teaching, love and heartache. And in a quick moment a fated threesome was formed. I did not know I was meeting the venerable Linda Holiday, Founder and Chief Instructor at North Bay Aikido. That didn’t matter then. We were three poets, and we identified each other by cadence, story, song, and a particular lilt of phrase and language that moved our souls.

It was as if I was suddenly handed two poet-angels who shared a name and a love of language, and who would accompany me throughout the journey. For eight years, Linda Holiday and Linda Serrato and I met every other month for lush long afternoons of poetry, laughter, tea, cookies, personal myth. It was with them that I grew into my writer self.

After many years and many deep and intimate life changes shared within our circle, one afternoon Linda Serrato quietly told us she was moving to Chico. She was heart-worried about her young son and the gangs of Salinas where she lived. She’d gone to college in Chico, and had family there. And thus Linda did that act of the fierce mother bear: she uprooted herself, her daughter and son, began teaching at a new school district, and started a new life. It was not an easy transition. The first year frayed the threads of all of their hearts. But in time Linda settled into a new school, a new home and a vibrant writing community. Her amazing son found his footing. Her daughter fell in love with Chico and the local state university. And our friend was five hours away.

Linda Holiday and I never relinquished meeting regularly and acting as ally and beloved on the writing path. Linda was the first to hear an early draft of my Introduction to Sisters Singing, providing her keen insight, and strengthening it’s rhythm and sentences. Linda, too, was one of three people I asked to read the first full draft of the manuscript, and her detailed feedback was a touchstone for me as I completed the book. And in the meantime, Linda herself continued with the project that Linda Serrato and I had years before first seen flicker into possibility: a book about the deep heart and spiritual philosophy of Aikido with her teacher in Japan. Her work on this book began with regular trips to Japan, recording hours upon hours of interviews with Anno Sensei. Then painstakingly transcribing these tapes, then shaping the material into passages–years of carving impossible writing time out of her already overflowing life as a mom and teacher and administrator of her ever-growing Aikido community. Her perseverance for many years has been the essence of that slow climb up the mountain–as so many books are–those impossible months or years when it feels that there will never be anything around the next bend but an endless, unending road. Linda kept her feet on the path. After many years, she is now beginning to talk with publishers and envisioning the final form for her book.

Both Lindas write poetry of pure spirit that moves my soul, and it was a joy to place their work in Sisters Singing. And, after my own long climb up a mountain, the moment came: our beautiful book was published, and Linda Serrato met Lara Gularte, another Sisters contributor in Chico, and proposed we come there for a reading. Suddenly Linda Holiday was driving north with Jean and I for a Sisters Singing reading, and a wonderful reunion of our sisterhood of poetry. How sweet and luscious to gather in Linda Serrato’s home and hug each other in happiness and recognition.

Heather Lyon, the vibrant young owner of Lyon’s Books, grew up in Santa Cruz and was thrilled to have us at her terrific independent bookstore in downtown Chico. Our Sisters tribe met early before the reading, in a little tutoring room in the back of the store. And there we were again, cohering as a unit of a greater stream of Sisters energy. I was particularly happy to meet Lara Gularte for the first time–a wonderful, soulful poet who invokes her Portuguese ancestors in a collection of poems she calls Above Paradise. Her “Grandfather” is one of the most poignant pieces in Sisters Singing. Lara was lovely, thoughtful and attuned as everyone spoke and connected, and I felt that wonderful sense I often have around a Sisters contributor I've just met–that I'd known her forever.

Lara read her poem to us there in the back room, gathered around a table with Elizabeth Tozier, Judy Phillips, both Lindas, Jean and I. Beth Tozier had journeyed five hours from Fort Bidwell in Modoc County with her husband to read. I met Beth years ago when she joined my writing group: a soft-hearted being of steel-like intelligence and crazy will. Beth, who has a librarian’s manner, taught at a Watsonville school for troubled teens for years, and knows a thing or two about gangs, colors, blood, spit, hope, perseverance, and the possibilities of the human heart. She retired a year ago, and made her way to the far northern edge of California where she and her husband are renovating a hundred-year-old farmhouse, and gazing at wild geese and a great horned owl who lives in the hills near their home.

One by one we all took a moment to practice in the small room, then came out into the store where a small intimate group gathered. How sweet for the reading to commence, to introduce my beloved Linda’s, one by one, how lush to hear them read. And what a lovely gift to then introduce Judy Phillips–who has the knack of having close friends all over the country. Two of them moved from Santa Cruz to Chico, so she and her poet-musician husband Dan planned their next trip to visit with our Sisters Singing reading. Judy read of grandparenting and of Spring! with great verve and beauty, and I gazed at her happily: she is a bedrock of our writing community, a beloved soul I am grateful to call friend.

I could do this forever, it seems: introduce the writers and artists and musicians from Sisters Singing and create a space for them to offer their gifs to the world. It is a strange and rare happiness, and it feels that my treasure trove is full. And so there I was, yet again introducing wonderful women to the world, feeling the room become more warm, the air rarified, as each poet read–from both of my Lindas, to Judy, to Jean, to Lara, to Beth. And then I was reading my own poetry, and Jean was ending with what Linda Holiday now calls her instant classic “We Must Insist.” And then the reading was over and everyone was talking and signing books and there were photos with Linda Serrato’s son and daughter, and that happy chattering that comes of something very well done. We walked through the warm Chico evening to a little café a few blocks down, and gathered to meet Judy’s friends and Beth’s husband, to talk with Linda Serrato’s daughter about college, and to Lara Gularte about being Portuguese and what it is to write poetry of ancestry and memory.

At the end of it all we found ourselves back at Linda Serrato’s house at 11pm, changing into pajamas– but this was too rare, too lovely, and Linda Serrato had told us she’d been writing a lot, including a piece that began, “I write skinny poems…” and we could not resist that. So we all gathered in the living room on the big couch, our old threesome along with Jean, up past midnight reading to each other. It was Linda Serrato’s new poems, more mature and beautiful than ever, and then Linda Holiday giving out copies of the Table of Contents for The Floating Bridge of Heaven: Exploring the Heart of Aikido with Anno Sensei, and then reading to us from the first chapter. It was me reading aloud from the Asheville portion of this journal, and Jean sharing with us new poems written just that day–and we were happy, and sated, and clear inside our skin.

We drove home the next day through heavy rain, talking and catching up, Linda Holiday telling Jean and I about the recent college search for her son Nathan, now seventeen. Time stretches and changes character, it seems. This is not new to say, but it is still surprising to find that fourteen years have gone by. A very different woman met Linda Serrato and Linda Holida all that time ago, and when I touch in with her it seems she is quite young indeed. But still, where did fourteen years go? That three-year old toddler who was immortalized for me in the first poems of Linda's that I ever heard has become a tall, thoughtful philosopher-mystic about to begin college 3,000 miles away. We have our book Sisters Singing now. Linda Holiday’s new book will be published in a year or so. So too, hopefully, a poetry collection from Linda Serrato.

The future we saw, when we began all those years ago, unfolds before us almost like a golden walkway. We worry and wonder and life is not simple. But looking back on our first meeting that night in 1994, our reading at Lyon’s Books and our reunion would have thrilled us to imagine then.

Around me, the redwoods creak and moan. A day and a half have gone by since I first began this piece. It’s night now, and I write with my flashlight on in my little tent-cabin. Today Joyce, Jean and I hiked together through the redwood forest, to a lush waterfall of smooth stone, green fern and joyous watery poetry streaming from the mouth of the earth. Tonight we sat by the fire and talked of our lives, laughing and sipping Irish whiskey. The moon rose between the trees like an ethereal spirit shyly flirting with us. The campground is empty: we have the forest to ourselves. Now the quiet of the night blankets me. Whatever it is that clamps down on my brain in a town has lifted. My mind is free. I can sit here and know that some essence of me, despite much recent change and newness, is entirely intact: in love with silence and redwoods, a campfire and old friends. What Sisters Singing has done is solidify and broaden the circle of communities that ring my life. And at the center is a simple woman: a poet, in love with this beautiful earth, a pen, and my notebook.

I brush my hand along this page. Thank you, I say to the trees, venerable ones, for the gift of your bodies, that I may write this song of love and remembrance. Thank you to the mountains, to these redwoods, to my dearest friend Joyce for bringing me here, and to my oldest poet friends, Linda Serrato and Linda Holiday. To you both, I say: you brought me to myself.