Blog
A Brief History of My Crushes
My first crush ever was my best friend's brother. This was in southern Chile. His parents were farmers whose parents hailed from Germany. We--my friend, my crush, my brother, and I--played in the hay bales in their barn. My next noteworthy crush was a visiting...
Odd-time Things
(Or: Thoughts as I Walk to my Temporarily-Closed Office) Walked to my office this morning--May 29, 2020--to pick up a fan which was going unused there. Passed people wearing masks. A few not. Stopped at drugstore for a prescription. Hear man six feet in front of me...
The Old Guy in Yoga
This old guy started coming to my yoga class a few months ago. A complete beginner, I thought, based on how he’d look around to get his bearings and figure out from his neighbors where his feet should be, say, or what it meant when our teacher said “hips facing forward” for warrior one, and then “opening your hips” for warrior two, “as if you were pressed between two planes of glass.” [Continue Reading]
“Hygge” for What Ails You!
There are lots and lots of things I believe to be true which I later discover I was partly or utterly wrong about. You may think me odd, but the realization that I could be wrong fills me with something like (but much better than!) hope: a sense of possibility....
Alone in the Cafeteria
Lonesome? Pull up a chair. This is for you. Everyone knows the alone in the cafeteria feeling. Even people who never sat alone in the cafeteria know the alone in the cafeteria feeling. You sit down. You open your brown paper bag hoping your mom didn’t go too...
Volver a los 17. A translation.
One of my favorite songs of all time was written by the late Chilean poet Violeta Parra and made famous by the now-also-late belovèd Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, who was affectionately known as “la negra”. This song makes me incredibly homesick: homesick for...
Breaking Bad + Homesick = Another Neruda Translation
Last week, while binge watching the last season of Breaking Bad, I heard a song I'd never heard that made my heart skip a beat and then pick up again more insistently. The music choices in Breaking Bad don't disappoint. First of all, rather than using music to cue the...
Hide ‘n’ Seek! (Also, counting twelve and keeping quiet with Pablo Neruda)
Hide 'n' Seek. Remember the wordless buzz with which you would scatter about while someone counted to twelve, or to twenty, or to whatever number you and your friends would have determined with so much ease, using that superpower you had (still do! maybe just dormant)...
Available now: “Hello, Sunday! Live from the Treehouse”
A quick note to tell you that I’ve gone and written a wee book. Not just any old wee book, mind you, but a chapbook. What’s that? You don’t know what the heck a chapbook is? Ah, let me do something about that… Wish you were HERE! (My wee book is available...
The Man at the Pond
What moved you? What made you laugh or cry today? What did you notice? Sometimes I ask myself those questions. They help me not take my life for granted. They help me feel more connected. And sometimes they make me bow. But yesterday morning these questions were the...
Tell me something true, something really really true
At the first sign of discomfort, I reach... I reach for something to put in my mouth. I reach for something to check. I reach for another something to drink. I reach for an old flame. A new flame. An extinguished flame. People have their little families, their little...
Breaking Bad: Peekaboo episode. A review, of sorts.
Me: Have you started watching Breaking Bad?
He: No.
Me: Why not? I need you to start so that you can catch up to me so that I have someone to process episodes with because that is the badassest show that is freaking me out that I have ever loved and gotten addicted to and I can’t believe I love it and it’s freaking me out and I need to process. Like episode 6 of season 2. Can I tell you it? [Continue Reading]
Thoughts on “Getting” Poetry
Sometimes poems wait for you. It’s like a poem has run up ahead to get the lay of the land and then waits for you to catch up. That’s how you can get a poem way before you get a poem, way before being able to put into words the why or the how of it. But somehow your...
Saying Sorry Old School
Your mom in rollers answers the back door and I ask are you home and she says sure darling and then calls your name long and loud up the stairs I wait It’s going to be a hot one she says to me and scratches under a roller why don’t you come in and have a glass of ice...
Painting my nails red
Yesterday I painted my nails red. Understand, I am not one to grow long nails, never really have been and certainly not now when I'd never want a client to feel anything even remotely like a long nail on a shoulder, on a back, or while I'm fulcrum-ing their head at...
Leonard Cohen, please don’t ever die.
I want to write about how I feel the tug of the other side, about how an awareness of not being, at least not in this form, sometimes makes my heart skip a beat. I wouldn't call it fear, exactly, though maybe it's fear's distant cousin, or a half-brother. It's a bit...
My lemonade stand has grown up!
I begged. "Please can we sell lemonade, please?" My friends Cari and Jenny stood next to me, nodding excitedly. Heidi's lemonade stand, circa 1976 Mom agreed. We lived in Wheaton, Illinois, that year. A block from the railroad tracks. Trains in Illinois were looooong...
Meet me in Rumi’s field (beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing)
My soft friend, I feel hard, hard like a rock-hard. Cynical and paranoid like poker-faced border guards eyeing your passport, suspicious like security officials patting you down, their calloused hands rough, impervious to your tender. I feel envious-hard of the people...
Pardon all the pronouns but Whitman was right: I am vast. I contain multitudes.
Heidi, for the love of all you love, do not do another thing until you write. And definitely, most definitely, do not talk to him —or anyone, for that matter— until you write. And also? Permission not to believe any of your thoughts, especially the conclusions your...
Chilean miners, ukuleles, and Laika.
This morning I watched live footage of the miners in Chile being pulled out of the ground in a capsule after 70 days of entrapment. I heard the Chilean Spanish of my childhood, and felt very close to what I watched. I was amazed by the silence and sense of calm about...
“You taste of ocean,” you said.
We arrived when the tide was turning, pulling upher hem like a mother who'd never once forgottenshe was a woman first and always. I went down to her edge, surely just to my ankles, I thought,but she lapped my legs and clapped her bawdy castanetson sand bars ever just...
Keeping you abreast
Today I want to write about sound. About how a sound can sneak up on you and kiss you when you need it. About how it can keep you company when you're alone. About how it can surprise you with things you'd never thought of. On a lonely day last year, probably winter, I...
Was that my breast you just called ‘pretty’?
I wasn't really too worried except for maybe a bit... Last week I had a routine ____ (I have no intention of gracing my screen with that word... it simply does not do justice to the beauty that are breasts). Anyway, the chick doing the ____ had no breastside manner...
Going back for me-then
You know how people might say something for some kind of ever and you just don't hear it? Maybe at some point you begin suspecting just how much you aren't hearing. You get curious, and with curiosity comes the teensiest opening to the possibility that there could be...
Do I believe in God?
Once upon a time I tried to die. But it wasn't my time. Too much was unlived, untapped, unknown. So much not yet done, if it had even begun, so busy had I been stuffing and hiding and numbing so as not to feel the ever present sense of far away from love, from home,...
Wanted: Sweet Relief
April is National Poetry Month. This one's been brewing for months. It's getting there. What Wants Saying Merchants of luxury trade in securities back and forth and up and down the walled streets of restless minds, selling lies of commission, omission, and so-called...
Couples counseling: Me and Time.
Time and I, we go way back. But things have gotten hard... Oof! So I called Curiosity and booked us a session. Curiosity is a frighteningly insightful dude. Most of the time he doesn't even have to say anything at all, although he does have this one eyebrow that...
Essence of You-ness
I got myself an itty bitty mortar 'n' pestle, a present for the hard stuff to get to the sweet stuff inside things like a vanilla bean and a cardamom pod and a restless, tired mind, which I crushed and added to a sexy Bosc pear sauteing it all on low flame with a...
Give and take
Yesterday’s wind, it took things with it, The leaves, for one. Another month, for two. For three, some threadbare fantasies. But it left a near-full moon and rolled out a red carpet to where I do not know. (1 Nov. 2009)
Wanted: A life.
Too much info not enough ear Too much bony not enough rear Too much quiet not enough shout Not enough action too much doubt Too much air and not enough ground Too much square not enough round Too much look and not enough find Not enough body far too much mind Too much...
T.S. Eliot helps this Mexican jumping bean get to essential.
The paring knife of life keeps peeling. In restlessness, in exasperation, on the edge of falling, I keep coming to: What is essential here? It is a question both clean and powerful. It moves around the immovable, leaving bullshit in its wake. Sitting in that question...
Away
To have and to hold are, to be sure, quite different from to hope and to dream, which are also, to be sure, away — maybe somewhere with you but away nonetheless, which is where I sense you, on your own. I would not bind you to me (if even I could), nor force anything...
Time Capsule Thursday #8: Walden Pond, Johnny Depp & Badass edition.
A weekly Time Capsule, of sorts, in which I pause and notice. And write down what I love. And notice all the reasons I don’t want to die before my time. And get curious. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little...
What moves you? What turns you on? Shepard Fairey, at the ICA.
What moves you? I mean, what really moves you? What takes your breath away and renders you incapable of averting your eyes? What fascinates you? What grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let you go until you look, really look? What wakes you up in the middle of the...
Time Capsule Thursday #7: summer sounds and moon-love.
A weekly Time Capsule, of sorts, in which I pause and notice. And write down what I love. And notice all the reasons I don’t want to die before my time. And get curious. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little...
Life: It awaits!
To get to know your heart, sometimes you have to sit in the dark. No night light. No flash light. No moon light. No stars. Alone, except for the ghosts flitting around you. And the wolf over by the window. And the snake in the corner. It’s so dark you can’t even read...
Time Capsule Thursday #6: dimples, joy, disabilities and possibilities.
A weekly Time Capsule, of sorts, in which I pause and notice. And write down what I love. And notice all the reasons I don’t want to die before my time. And get curious. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little...
Time Capsule Thursday #5: herbs, Vermont, sun & a reading sabbatical. (Mostly).
Time Capsule Thursdays, in which I pause and notice. And write down what I love. And notice all the reasons I don’t want to die before my time. And get curious. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little tradition...
Time Capsule Thursday #4: where there’s a way there’s a way. Oh and a bunny.
Time Capsule Thursdays, in which I pause and notice. And write down what I love. And choose life. And get curious. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little tradition (with a hat tip to Havi). Italicized* questions...
Time Capsule #3: gray days, yellow birds.
Time Capsule Thursdays, in which I pause and notice. And write down what might otherwise go forgotten. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And do my own little tradition inspired by Havi Brooks’ Friday Chicken. What was most tender?...
A poem came pounding on my door…
A poem came pounding on my door today and I had to let it in. I asked it for a point and it yelled at me, something about no time for talk. It told me that my chest will explode if I don’t give it a pen already. And that my heart will shrivel up and die if I don’t let...
Time Capsule #2: Tears, bells, and pieces.
Time Capsule Thursdays, in which I pause and notice. And write down what might otherwise go forgotten. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And honor age-old wisdom (bloggingly exemplified over at The Fluent Self): “Because...
Thursday Time Capsule #1: First ever edition! (REO Speedwagon, birds and raindrops)
Time Capsule Thursdays, in which I pause and notice. And write down what might otherwise go forgotten. And am inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Gratitude” (in What Do We Know). And honor age-old wisdom (bloggingly exemplified over at The Fluent Self): “Because...
A tight box + big energy + curiosity + Leonard Cohen = change
Change. It happens. It’s the way of things, of life. Inside me something’s been pent up for something like forever. Tied up. Stifled. It’s some kind of energy. Isn’t energy a property of matter related to its ability to perform work? You know, work. As in motion,...
Wearing less. Like a sexy dress.
The other morning I passed a lady fumbling for keys in her bag to open her little manicure shop on Mass Ave. We exchanged a quick smile and I felt my heart swell with appreciation: The fact that she’d gotten out of bed.That she’d showered and fixed herself up.That...
The Point.
What’s the point— Just last week, I was asking that about life, and once or twice I could taste the panic rising in my throat. Thing is, that question has no good answer. It’s an endless kind of loop. Which is to say, not helpful, whatsoever. I know all too well where...
Death by bursting heart. Or, crushing on Leonard Cohen.
Mercy death Just the other day I died a little a lot again and again right here on the floor while Leonard Cohen stole my breath with his holy irreverence streaming in Live from London He was the light and the crack and the bird on a wire I was Suzanne with the tea...
Too Many Names (by Pablo Neruda)
(Translation (c) Heidi Fischbach. “Demasiados Nombres” is the Spanish, original title) Monday tangles up with Tuesday and a week with the whole year. Time cannot be cut with your weary scissors, all the names of the days are washed away by the night. No one can...
Grandma & I
(My grandma Eck died last week. 94 years old. She and I had a good many things in common, some of which I loved, others not so much. Here’s my little eulogy for her!) One of the things I most enjoy having in common with Grandma is where I grew up. A beautiful place in...
I ask for silence (Pablo Neruda)
(Translation (c) Heidi Fischbach. Read Neruda’s original “Pido Silencio” here Now if you’d leave me in peace.Now if you’d get on without me. I am going to close my eyes And I only want five things,five favorite roots. The first is love without end. The second is to...
Dearest Life, Bring it on! Love, Heidi
A facebook friend’s status line said: “Write 500 words on what you are at your most happy, prosperous and healthy. Amazing fun. Do it now.” I do so love receiving simple direction. Here goes! At my most happy I am calm in my heart and belly even when my mind is a-buzz...
Waiting a la Isadora Duncan & walking in momma’s heels
Sometimes the hardest thing is to be still. To wait for right action to arise. I’m not talking sitting on your butt waiting for life to come and find you. No. It’s more an alert kind of stillness even while in the thick of things. There is a story of dancer Isadora...
Move over squirrel. I a hummingbird now.
Somewhere between the if-you-don’t-have-anything-good-to-say-don’t-say-anything-at-all camp and the it’s-still-freaking-winter-and-I’m-climbing-the-walls camp, is a place of OK-ness. You know, OK: you aren’t jumping for joy euphorically, but neither are you throwing...
Thank you thank you thank you!
Wherever I happen to be, at any given moment, gifts are there for the noticing. Even circumstances that on first blush look unfortunate, can be loaded with gifts. I open my laptop, spill my drink, and make two new friends. On my left and on my right people jump up to...
That’s plenty
I’ve often been a hold-on-er. A white-knuckle-r afraid to let go of things and people that leave. But it’s no fun to live that way. Not for me, and I’m sure not for them either. Underneath my grip is a fear of not having enough. Of not being taken care of. Of being...
Mona Lisa Eyes
In longing you close your eyes, but in wonder you open them… -Myra Shapiro I started writing—really writing, like my life depended on it—when I was 11 and went off to boarding school for the first time to a country a 10-hour drive plus a 5-hour flight from where my...
Me and Billy Collins
It’s not for not having people who love me. Not at all. And it’s not for not loving people, including a number whose side I would pick up and fly around the world to be at in a moment’s notice if ever they said the word. There's even a dear I have no doubt would hide...
Sometimes I want to be…
Sometimes I want to be my niece Caroline who’s cool and groovy, an awesome swimmer with a butterfly stroke that makes you jump up and down with joy (she’s 8!) and a growing leaf collection. Caroline loves girly things AND earthworms. She thinks slugs are a bit...
August moon
I fell asleep with a full moon beaming on my leg and I could not sleep without putting moon on paper so I wrote this in the dark by light of said moon while a fan whirled moon-air onto moon-beamed leg and I said to myself: it is good to be alive. —————— © Heidi...
Rilke, Machado and your stolen light
That flashlight you say I stole (but you had two !)—I used it last night to read Rilke under coverto the patter of rain and a clock ticking two. It shone a dim, just-full-enough moonon the baffling beauty that a lover of word and worldcan make out of being inexorably...
Humlum
I have joint custody of a stuffed bear. He was a gift early in my last relationship when my love had to be away traveling very often. We took great joy in naming him for a dear character in a somewhat obscure favorite book. The bear's name is Oscar Humlum, though...
Menagerie
Who is the clambering animal in me and what does she clamber for? What dreams rest on my Rocky Mountain peaks? What wants lie wedged in the crags of my Sierras? What animal warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas? Like “The Guesthouse” by Rumi, Carl Sandburg’s...
Life is too short…
to hold it in to feign interest to play games to say yes when I mean no to say no when I want to say yes not to play to not adore my ex to let lack of a bathing suit keep me out of a body of water to wear tight shoes to not write a love letter when the heart is...
What will he think!
Of late, I’ve been in the throes of a crush and a throng of “what will he/they/you think” harpies has been talking in my ear at about the volume of an 11 on the Spinal Tap amp. A ticker tape of my thoughts yesterday might have looked something like this: Let’s check...
belly dance drama
This morning, barely awake, I lay in bed noticing an area of my body I’d never really noticed so distinctly before. My entire back ribcage ached and my mind went to town busily doing what it does. What is THAT?! What? My back! All my back ribs. It hurts to move. Oh...
J.K. Rowling vs. Chairman of the Fed
This just in: J.K. Rowling will be the commencement speaker for Harvard’s graduation on June 5. Prepare to shut down, our dear fair city, Cambridge. But really… um… I’m nursing a slight resentment here, on account of the fact that in 1999 we got Alan Greenspan,...
I wish I had a river…
Sometimes I feel alone in the world. Like lately. To borrow Joni Mitchell’s words: “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees, they’re putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace — I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” I just went to the...
Dream: Thirty nine
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) is long overdue. I’ve been holding onto it for too long and when I go to return it at the library my fine is $39. I don’t have the money with me to pay. I want them to wave the fee and tell me I don’t have to pay, that they’ll let...
Winking trucks
Happy freedom day. I’m on my way to North Carolina to visit my sister and her 3 kids with my mom… should be interesting, to say the least, the faces from which I will see myself reflected back to me. I’m looking forward to seeing my 2 nephews and my newest little...
Some thoughts on advice and prayer
You lose your grip and then you sink into the masterpiece… —Leonard Cohen in “A Thousand Kisses Deep” I used to give a whole lot of advice to God. I called it prayer. But it was more like a to do list or a Santa Claus wish list: please help me find my retainer that I...
And most of all today I love…
…listening to the blizzard wind howling and watching the white bag that’s been caught in a high branch in the tree right outside my window for going on two winters. It used to ruin my view, and I used to call it names like “trash.” But at some point along the way that...
Heidi’s Birthday
My friend, Pierre, wrote this poem for me on my birthday. I love it. (by P.C. Billon)Shifting your weight, you’ve made your feet at home In the soft, white sand.You stop, for a moment And let the world continue on its way. The clouds inch their way inland, And dusk is...
The anniversary of my death
In the last few years I been making friends with death—with the idea of death, I should say, for how could I ever know what it is before it actually happens? It’s been about opening to the possibility of death not being so bad after all. This has included opening my...
The house of bottles
There’s a house I love in my neighborhood. Whenever I can, I walk by way of this house. It is a luscious canyon-orange, Victorian with a big porch, upon which a green rocker sits waiting oh-so-patiently. I have never, to this day, seen anyone actually sitting and...
Message from a hole
First rule of holes: When you are in one, stop digging.Molly Ivins I’m in a hole. Embarrassing to say for one who loves sharing things related to finding freedom and joy, but here I am, in a hole. And, mostly I’ve been digging. When I finally stop and just...
Dream: Rocks and hard places
It starts where many a movie chase ends: on the rooftop of a tall city building where---in the absence of a cape or spider webbing and having no place left to run---the bad guys and the good guys duke it out. But when I open the door from the stairwell onto my tall...
Playing Now
Young children naturally take on the beliefs of influential adults around them. In Playing Now a young girl speaks with the mythical Great Mother about the meaning of eternity and forever. Something about the idea of heaven and hell just doesn’t sit well with her,...
August moon
I fell asleepwith a full moonbeaming on my legand I could not sleepwithout writing it downby light of ancient moonand flashlight phone and fanwhirling summer onto goosebumpsand I said It is good—it is good to be alive.
Dying awake
When I die, as I die, may I die with eyes wide open. May I not miss a single moment of going, of ending, and if it is to be so, of coming, of beginning. Even as the walls tumble and the floors break apart and the shelves with tome upon tome of things I thought I knew...
Love and death on Valentines
“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your...
Live the Questions Now
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which...
Greeting what comes…
Happy New Year, dear friends. It is with a sense of joy and anticipation of surprise that I greet you and the new year on this first day of 2006. The desire to write and connect with you has been gurgling inside me. This afternoon, walking through the Parc La Fontaine...
Chopin & grief
Friday, 2 December 2005Cambridge, MA Frederic Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Romance/Larghetto The soul sings in this piece in big, wide, sweeping movements, peppered with beautiful, detailed sidebars for the exploring. But even in its beauty and expressive wonder...
Laughing with Billy Collins
Tuesday, 1 November 2005 Cambridge, MA Tonight I feel lucky to be living in Cambridge. The rents might be higher than most places in the country and it gets mighty cold for the winter which lasts much more than the three months allotted to it by the calendar… But...
About food, literally and so-to-speak.
This is about food. It’s about body. It’s about control and lack thereof. It’s also about wanting to connect. It’s about wanting to be known. It’s about wanting to be able to talk about things we tend to hide. The Geneen Roth thing worked many years ago, when, after a...