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Moving On, Anew

This slideshow is a fraction of the snapshots from a fraction of my journeys during 2020 – 2023. The first shot is of my feet up in the garden of a Silver Lake sanctuary in Los Angeles while I was musing on where to go next, in between–amid other ordinarily extraordinary things–getting two books out into the world. One could say I was in a foxy den there, licking wounds in a beautiful spot. I was also writing, editing, teaching online, and occasionally acting. Most of my adventures were driving explorations through grief–of losses and disasters, some willed, most not. They also were celebrations of freedom, and often after a completed draft. While writing about these journeys recently, I realized though I was alone in the car, there were many other folks in there with me, perhaps listening to the conversations I was having with them and myself about love and home.

And now, I enter a new era of my life. This week I joined the Barcelona team of the American College of the Mediterranean as a full-time Faculty Advisor. After years of working on my own from wherever I was, and searching for a place I would love to land and work with others, it is happening, and I am really happy about that. I am also deeply grateful for the pleasures and gifts of the solitude, wandering, and wondering of the last eight years. What a wonderful time I had exploring the country I was born in, then making my way back here, to this Barcelona home, to this city and sea I love.

I have spent much more time than I planned on selecting images and have to stop and go out for a walk up on the mountain overlooking the city before the light goes. I would love to show you the beauty I saw throughout California (there are only a couple of shots in this video of the splendid Sonoma Coast). And there are so many Midwestern travels I’d like to share, including the Upper Mississippi Valley I love so and wrote about in I am home. All these journeys could each be a book and movie on their own. So could other amazing travels during those American years–alone, and with my son–across the US, within Mexico, and finally back in Europe. It’s been a traveling life.

But this little picture show is already eight-and-a-half-minutes long. A good accompaniment to coffee in the morning. I selected the shots with the intention of putting you in the driver’s seat.

Traveling far and long alone, I saw the diversity of the United States and witnessed the behavior of some of its inhabitants. There is outrageous wealth and gutwrenching misery. Opulence and abandon. Cruelty and kindness. Violence and generosity. There are also folks living simple and beautiful lives.

Ah, the open roads! The vast landscapes. The freedom. The beauty. I highly recommend that everyone solo travel for a while.

When I see myself in some of these shots it makes me feel happy. I loved hanging out with Marianne.

Life is a precious opportunity. I am looking forward to sharing my love for it with curious students from across the United States who come to Barcelona to do their own exploring.

Thanks for your time. I hope you find this imperfect offering inspiring.

DRIVING: An American Flâneuse on Wheels

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The body of Saint Teresa of Avila-did they all want a part of her ecstasy?

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini, Basilica of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

Thinking on the woman and her body parts. Our bodies being our own kind of thing. Maybe you know this already. I was set back just now reading about Teresa de Avila’s body parts being cut off and out, and held by different people and in different places–this after her death, and during exhumations, and including thefts of her body. Human beings can be so weird. Did they all want a part of her ecstasy?

The body is now back in Alba de Tormes, Spain, except for the following parts:

  • Rome – right foot and part of the upper jaw
  • Lisbon – right hand
  • Ronda, Spain – left eye and left hand (the latter was kept by Francisco Franco until his death, after Francoist troops captured it from Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War)
  • Museum of the Church of the Annunciation, Alba de Tormes – left arm and heart
  • Church of Our Lady of Loreto, Paris, France – one finger
  • Sanlúcar de Barrameda – one finger

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WRITE YOURSELF HOME

Do you have a story inside you? One you would like to tell but are unsure how? 

Let your voice be the guide.

Come home to yourself through writing. 

Learn how to create a map to discover your hidden treasures as you trace the ways life has taken you.

Begin a new journey.

Come join us for this ninety-minute createshop. Leave inspired with all you need to complete a first draft. You’ll have a map, tried & tested writing tools for the road, and an exhilarating sense of the freedom discipline can bring.

Register via e-mail by October 10.  Space is limited to 9 participants.

Online via ZOOM. Thursday, October 17, 2024, 19h–20h30, CET.

35 Euros.  Scholarships available.

Register via e-mail

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Talking about home in Barcelona!

Friday, September 27th, 6:30 pm at Backstory Bookshop–C/ de Mallorca, 330

Please join Kristi Hovington and me for a lively and fun discussion about the choices we make, roads we take, and the ways our hearts can shake when we make homes outside the culture we were born into. Insiders and outsiders and being both, how do we go about making the world our home? And in what ways do we understand home? Both of my books explore what home can mean, so there will be mention (and a pile) of them I’ll be happy to sign. Or bring your copy with you. Let’s chat!

As travelers and ex-pats know, leaving home forces the question of where home really is. Join author and professor, Marianne Maili, and editor and librarian, Kristi Hovington, for a lively conversation, a Q&A, and an inspiring writing prompt about what we mean when we talk about home.

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Shining Solitude

A response to Krista Tippett and On Being’s call for submissions about solitude. August 1, 2017. Gold Coast Studio Chicago. Came upon this the other day and was entranced by this Marianne. Have you ever seen former versions of yourself and thought, wow, I missed that? I mean, I was in there yet I was looking out. I thought about cutting this as I watched it yet stopped myself as I like the imperfection of it, the naturalness, the vulnerability, and the shining.

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Tell me the one about Satchel Paige again, Dad.

We sat on the swing, eating bing cherries, pushing off the grass, looking out over the valley down deep in which my dad and his mom grew up. “Tell me the one about Satchel Paige again,” I said.

“Satchel was up to bat and I was playing centerfield. Satchel’s hit lobbed into centerfield, and was almost a trap, but I caught it before it hit the ground, and the umpire called Satchel out and it was the third out. As headed toward the dugout and passed Satchel heading toward the pitching mound, he looked rough, that man, like 90 miles of bad road, and he said, “You say you caught that ball, Hoerner, I’m gonna strike you out.”

So when I came up to bat, Satchel pitched, and I drove a home run into the center field bleachers. I wasn’t dinkin’ around.”

Dad drove in all four runs of that game for the win. June 29, 1951.

I loved swinging with him and listening to his stories. Recently, around Father’s Day, my sister sent me a photo of this article in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald.

Wow! I answered, thrilled to see Dad’s name and to read Erik Hogstrom calling him “one of the Key City’s finest homegrown players.” Sister Julie told me our brother Dan had gone to Finley hospital that morning with his wife, Linda, and after she was wheeled into surgery, and he was in the waiting room turning in circles and worried, he picked up the paper, opened it, and there was Dad. So Dan sent the photo to Julie in Iowa City and Julie sent it to me in Barcelona, and it made the ache for him ease in all of us. And we all called each other, too. Thanks to Erik and the Telegraph Herald!

Below is a slide-show of some photos of other clippings I found in a box in the fall of 2018, months after Mom died, and while I was in Iowa City, working on I am home. The story of Satchel and Dad that night varies a bit with everyone who tells it. I’d like to write about all of the clippings I found in that box, highlighting some of the fabulous language those sportswriters of yesteryear used. Seeing Mom’s handwriting on the date, June 29, 1951, and knowing my father died on June 23, 2011, I wondered when we buried him so did a quick search and saw it was June 27. Almost 60 years to the day after that remarkable evening that made him and many others smile for the rest of his life.

To imagine my dad, Beltin’ Bobby Hoerner, at 25, and Mom, 24, childless, a whole life ahead of them, celebrating the win and the runs that night also makes me smile. Their first child was born on April 30, 1952. Dad still played for a year or two after that. Gosh, how I wish I could have seen him beltin’ them in.

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Sometimes

there is a resistance to write at the same time there is a drawing toward the page. deep inside, new understandings are bubbling up from a deeply stirred well, pocking in the heretofore unseen sediment resting at the bottom for god knows how long. the understandings feel icky thus the resistance to touching them, to looking at them, to owning them. and maybe they are just passers-by. which leads to the consideration that these understandings and feelings could be common, and the pocks perhaps a way to get the poison and sickness out. human, human, human, you are, they whisper. not god. but yes, god, too, connected to god, an angelic voice chimes in. the whole mess seems like a connecting agent, like muddy mortar that could adhere the tiles we each are in the mosaic of humanity. does it ever happen in your life that when a situation you have been long concerned about seems to be resolving itself, new concerns–or concerns you have turned your attention away from because they seemed less important than the newly resolving concern–insist upon your attention? it feels hard to see beauty in the mud of shame, humiliation, regret, envy, disappointment, fear, longing–and some call these negative emotions–yet how to move through and grow from them without becoming self-indulgent in a mud bath of self-regard? they are all about the past and here we are in the present. and how to grow without them, and thus, how can they be negative? how to look at these discomforts without indulging in self-consciousness? how to swim through them and emerge fresher and cleaner? To remind ourselves that we all have worth, regardless of our behavior. Our behavior is another story. This all the more stirred by listening to Dignity by Donna Hicks, PhD, which is recommendable. “Safety lies in connection with others […] we develop the awareness of our worth in relationship with others.” And her questions what does dignity feel like and does it perhaps feel like love?

Yet something written: This feeling of nothing and no one to hold onto–connect to–right here at home–yet, here we are, at home. Yet, yes, relationship with others. This feeling of things to write about which are difficult to approach–more changes, more growth & depth & opening & a trembling, too–and to put it all on paper overwhelms–yet here is jotting & noting things on IG that arouse envy, repel, & make sad and then a pushing to feel happy for the poster– A poster. Interesting. Look. How many of us have become posters? Human posters.

And this is with little mention of the news, which is terrifying.

“What is love if not the act of honoring dignity?” Again, Donna Hicks’s question.

Dignity even when in a cualdron of mud. Privileged to have the time to think about it all. Afraid to post because it may all sound trite. Looking for humor, lost somewhere in the mud, next appears the image of a naked muddy woman. A funny reflection with a frog in her hand waving hello.

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Home in our bodies?

Breaking and entering the land of the free and the home of the brave is a crime.

excerpt from I am home., Chez Soi Press 2023

Just finished reading this article about women who have come out to say they have been bodily assaulted by the accused defendant and presidential hopeful actually on trial. They are angry and concerned for themselves and their neighbors after speaking out about having suffered an unauthorized entry of their bodily home by someone with the intent of committing a theft of their integrity and dignity. It stirs a lot in me, this breaking and entering of another human. So does the template of denial seeming to have more power than truth. Also alarming is how people seem to find the issue–unwanted sexual touch, and unwanted touch of one’s person in general, in other words, one’s body up for grabs–unimportant and common and therefore somehow acceptable. I write this thinking about a recorded statement by the accused claiming the privilege of grabbing, and after having seen photos of some women with t-shirts glorifying that grab. The female body, in particular, is more obviously considered public domain. Look at how the state is again taking more control of it via a Supreme Court which includes other accused deniers.

Who has the power to abuse and in so doing normalizes abuse? How is and was that power obtained? How are people okay with a flagrant denier (and admitter) of abuse representing a supposed land of the free and the brave? To those who are unbothered by it–do they understand that anthem to mean US citizens are free to abuse and brave to deny?

How often do you touch people without asking their permission? Do you ever touch someone you feel has more power than you without their permission? Would you even dare to ask for it? How do you feel when people touch you without your permission, especially people you would prefer to keep at a distance? Are you aware of it? Do you pay attention to it? Do you move through this world expecting it?

IndieBound

Lucy, go see. and I am home. are available wherever books are sold.

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It’s just one of those things.

You could probably say this about moments of your life while on your way home and it would be true for you, too.

This page comes to mind often. It used to be in I am home. and for a while was the opener. After moving it around, I decided it was unnecessary, yet it comes back. Always playfully and in mystery, and especially living here in Catalonia right now. Always when readers mention moving around in the story at ease. What songs would your heart sing if you played it like a xylophone? What patterns and colors do you see when you look into the kaleidoscope of your life?

Thanks for coming. Thanks for being here. Wishing you wonders.

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