I Heard What You Weren't Saying

By Natalie Flowers

Though she writes of the pain, it’s the space between the lines where the healing appears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304328984

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foreword

Like no one else I’ve ever known, Natalie illuminates every room she enters, and warms all those who cross her path. People meeting her the first time often remark how unlike others she is. I have heard grown adults marvel over her love of life and child-like curiosity. They are most moved, though, by her amazing vision and unflinching ability to speak truths, no matter how uncomfortable.

The day Natalie and I met was the day my father loaded us into his VW bus and drove 600 miles from Dallas, Texas to Cimarron, New Mexico. I was 16 years old, Natalie 17, and we were headed to New Mexico for an intense 15-day program modeled after Outward Bound. We both survived the wilderness program; thus began our friendship. More than three decades later, I am grateful to have Natalie as a constant part of my life as dear friend and adopted family member.

Perhaps our initial half-month wilderness challenge sowed the seeds of surviving future ordeals. Since then, Natalie and I have hiked together, worked alongside each other; we have comforted each other in loss, discussed life’s challenges, shared recovery, and celebrated daily victories.

Natalie taught me how to play guitar, and then 10 years later played for my bride and me on our wedding day. Every time I read The Wedding, I cry softly and smile broadly, sometimes at the same time. Natalie’s telling of my wedding story takes me back more than 20 years to the day I crossed the divide of aloneness to partnership. Grateful to be married to my best friend, I'm so thankful for the memories retold by one of my oldest and dearest friends.

Survivors thrive. I believe true character shines brightest when times are toughest. Natalie has experienced highs and lows, turbulence and challenges beyond what anyone should endure, yet the first words out of her mouth invariably are focused on the welfare of another through a question or an uplifting remark; each is woven with lessons and truths that make up the beautiful, rich fabric that is Natalie’s life. One can only walk away blessed after meeting, reading, or hearing Natalie.

Phone message (June 29, 2013):

[Joyful laughing] I love the New Mexico rain. I’ve waited seven years to smell the freshness and feel it on my face. I was thinking of you driving from New Mexico.

A 10 second phone message that makes one smile...It’s easy to imagine how reading one of Natalie’s stories will get you laughing, living, and loving life right now.

Natalie Flowers’ stories are at once as gentle as an early summer New Mexico rain and as warm as the afternoon desert sun. While rereading a few of her stories alone recently, I found myself laughing out loud and looking around for someone to share.

Natalie’s gifts are many. Yes, healer heads the list for me. Her voice is pure silk, guitar playing magical, and writing lively and uplifting. However, Natalie’s ability to let go of the pain without forgetting the lesson is especially important in a life of many challenges. Though she writes of the pain, it’s the space between the lines where the healing appears.

The question I asked after reading Massage of the Seven Deadly Sins: "Who heals the healers?" You won't envy Natalie when reading about her massage misadventures, though I'm positive you'll appreciate the healing arts even more. When someone pours their energy and skill into you, as massage therapists do, no amount of money can ever be construed as over-tipping. Lesson learned.

In these stories, as in her life, Natalie shares the raincoat off her back, the chicken from her fridge, and the toilet bucket down the hall complete with natural herb air freshener. I’ve rarely been more moved by a story than I was while reading The Bucket, a treasure about reluctant movements. Thank you, Natalie for giving a shit...and flushing afterwards. I know Natalie can appreciate the words my father often uses when discussing trash, refuse, and landfills: There is no away. This is one case where I’ll beg to differ. I also am fairly certain the next time you use a flush toilet—after reading The Bucket—your level of appreciation might reach the euphoric level of relief Natalie experienced in the semi-civilized Sonora desert town of Tucson.

Natalie’s stories place you in the room with her. As I read them I could see her smiling and still imagine the teenage free spirit, wise soul I met many years ago. I am so appreciative and in awe of Natalie’s ability to get at the heart of a matter through writing in prose and song. She captures moments from a unique perspective that allows others to laugh during the darkest moments and weep with joy at others.

I was with Natalie in her stories, not physically but fully enmeshed woven in like I was the art on the walls or the next customer in line behind the Holy Roller. The chicken is cooked, the truth is raw, and the pleasure is deep. My mouth hung open as I read how a chicken got between Natalie and a man in the Selfish Fuck. The purchased poultry— thoughtful offering to a last supper never served or empty body of gluten free communion meal—I’ve never cheered so loudly for someone to leave an unhealthy relationship.

Through 30+ years of knowing Natalie and so many wonderful moments, it’s hard to narrow the list of what makes her so special to me. Perhaps it’s this: Natalie has an uncanny ability to be present in every moment, to drink up the nectar of the now. That’s it.

After reading The Choctaw Nation Pow-Wow, I started a note to Natalie that I never sent. It read simply, Thank you, Natalie, for loving all who cross your path and allowing all who live a place in your heart, regardless of the skin they dwell in or the circumstances they've endured.

In this volume Natalie has captured life’s moments, the kind you and I can relate to even though we might never imagine being there ourselves. Whether you've read one of the 27 Stories that came before, or if this is your first time hearing Natalie’s voice, say thanks for the blessing you're about to receive.

Robert McMahan

Introduction

The Jungle

Of course this will sound funny to you. And I will tell it anyway.

When I was 18 years old, I went to Copper Canyon, Mexico, with four engineering students.

We drove to El Paso in a giant green 1970’s car, crossed over the border on foot, caught a bus to Chihuahua City, and caught a train to Divisidero. We got off the train two towns over, at San Rafael. I'm sure that San Rafael looks much like it did 25 years ago but I cannot be certain.

We took our backpacks, topography maps, freeze dried food, camp stoves, and anything one might need for backpacking in the wilderness. Two of us had taught backpacking for the Boy Scouts of America.

The train ride was fantastic. It was March, and the bus took us out into countryside so desolate you'd swear that only snakes and lizards could survive. Copper Canyon, though, while having all of the aspects of a canyon full of rocks, in places had lush vegetation. People had attempted to build houses into the sides of the earth there, like tiny cabins. The pigs were enormous, like giant German Shepherds, and the little church we found felt especially holy.

There was a 250 foot waterfall near where we camped. We got lost right away and ended up bushwhacking for most of the journey until we found suitable camping accommodations. Then we just moved out from there and returned, near sunset, to our camp.

The sun set every day kind of early, and when it did, it got really cold. It was March, like I said. The wind in my hair on the train could not compare with the canyon wind in my hair after the sun had set. I was frozen a great deal of the time, on top of being sunburned so badly that I made makeshift sleeves out of my bandannas to shield what was left of the skin on my arms after stupidly choosing not to use sunscreen.

I took out some reading material.

Remember, I am camping in a space ten times as vast as the Grand Canyon, where Tarahuamara Indians beat their drums every day at 11:00 am and 5:00 pm. The only camera I had, I got for $11 at a little store on Steinway Street in New York City for my 10th birthday. It was a Kodak, a gift from my grandmother.

So, I had already ventured out and attempted to photograph the 250 foot waterfall, which I had to do in segments because the Kodak didn't do panoramic shots. And, I had enjoyed sitting up on top of the precipice, a little ways away from the waterfall, close enough to hear its majesty and far enough away to not be taken treacherously down the 250 foot drop onto the rocks below.

And there it was that I read THE JUNGLE in all of its horrible entirety, with the Mexican sun beating down on me, birds flying high in the sky above me, and the peace of the entire universe flowing in waves across and through my entire being.

I read THE JUNGLE. I guess that’s the kind of person I was back then, looking for the most gruesome details of something long past (I WAS on the verge of vegetarianism, which I practiced for two years some time after I read that book).

Just thought I'd give you that little picture.

Eventually, the wheel which keeps on turning meets itself. Each beginning, ready or not, is born from the latest ending. Things that you used to be angry about are finally repaired with forgiveness. And in the meantime, there is the long journey, with friends met, friends lost, and so many realizations that come with climbing the spiritual mountain.

I dedicate these stories to my dear friend Leigh Wise, who always taught me to make a collage of my life when it started getting the better of me, and to Ken White, who always knew the right thing to say and when to say it.

Obsessions

Once, while reading a book about how to write, I came across a statement that said that we basically write about that with which we are obsessed, and that by making a list of these things, we would see the wealth of material before us, a cornucopia of literary opportunity just waiting there in the ether for us to pull down onto paper. When I made my list I was 31 years old, and it looked something like this: food, sex, death, war, peace, world travel, and shopping. I'm kidding about the shopping, but if I have to be honest, shopping is on the list now, and the mere fact that it exists there at all bothers me immensely. Shopping has become more of a study in human behavior for me, and even though it is not a personal obsession of mine, I have noticed that it is one for many.

See, I grew up part of the time in Dallas, Texas, and another part of the time in New York City. Dallas has often been referred to as a buyer’s market because you can buy just about anything from anywhere there. My personal experience as a teenager there was that by just BEING in the environment of Dallas, I felt compelled to dress like a legal secretary a great deal of the time. My skirts were lined, my purse matched my shoes, I wore hose and camisoles underneath my clothes, even when it was hot outside, and I never had enough of these ensembles to please me. This is supposed to wear off later, but I have seen from working in retail that it doesn't wear off. People become more and more obsessed with having things, whatever the things may turn out to be, and accumulating them and paying for them becomes an unavoidable and unstoppable daily habit.

Being in New York City was a little different. I was only ten years old, so accumulating anything that I couldn't eat or play with didn't really interest me. I'm not sure that I had developed anything other than these things to be obsessed with yet, unless you included being a part of a group, which I never was and always wanted to be. I left New York in 1973, when the hit song on the radio was Heartbeat, it’s a Lovebeat by Tony DiFranco, and the news that Jim Croce had died was all over the radio, and the Watergate trials were being broadcast on the television when I came home after school every day. When I returned to New York in 1988 on a 10,000 mile road trip with my friend Vern, a piece of pizza and a bottle of water cost $5.00. You could buy a bouquet of flowers from a woman on the street corner for $1.50 in the middle of winter, and in the fashion district near Times Square, I saw a dress that my friends had purchased for me back in Austin that cost four times less money than it had at the department store in Texas.

It has been thirty years since I lived in New York City with my grandmother, and I have gone through a myriad of circumstances and trials. Some of them revolve around shopping; many of them have nothing to do with it. When I turned 14, I went on a trip to the mountains in the middle of winter, backpacking with 31 people, and my perspective about how much stuff we really need made a 180 degree turn. Determined to succeed at backpacking, I returned for several years to New Mexico, all in hopes that I would be able to conquer the mountains. That is where I learned about their ineffable power. When I became a backpacking instructor, that sensible part of my background never completely went away, to the point that I could literally leave any town I was in with only what I could carry, first on my back, later in my car. I was able to discard what I didn't need, just to make room for space to sleep or breathe, without flinching. People even started paying me to help them clean out their cluttered houses, so I got a first hand educated look at what hoarding stuff does for you.

Last year, I lived in the same place for 10 months. When I moved in I had two bowls and two mugs, an apple corer and a potato peeler, two cooking knives, and no silverware. I had to buy a set of eating utensils and was surprised when I chose silver with gold trim on it. Regal. I discovered that part of me was regal, and all this time I had believed something else. The hard part came when I invited my designer friend to dinner as a thank-you for working on the art for a CD cover for me. I realized that I didn't have any plates, and that it would be hard to serve a piece of fish in a tiny handmade bowl, so I went off to the discount store to get some plates. I bought two. It took me forever to choose them, and for ten days after that I felt really disturbed that I had such heavy items to cart around, as if the plates themselves would limit me from buying a ticket to anywhere and hiking all over the place when the time came. The dinner was a success, and I later became brave enough to buy two more plates, square ones that were this really pretty shade of blue, and I actually used them for awhile before I left them in my friend Lynne’s kitchen forever.

For awhile I worked in a toy store. Every day I talked to people and sold them things that they really didn't need but felt inclined to buy so that their children or their grandchildren would have a good life, and every day I wondered what I was doing, standing behind a counter ringing up merchandise made in China and Germany, when where I desired to be was sitting outside somewhere on a rock near a tree and writing, or just breathing, or singing, or eating something. I consoled myself in the fact that the merchandise I got to sell was at least entertaining (where else could you purchase a booger keychain, a gyro wheel, and a packet of explosive confetti in the same area?), and I got to wear a fake velvet hat with a Sheriff badge and real blanket stitching on it and say Howdy! to people when they walked in the door. (In that place, when you wore a Sheriff hat, people automatically thought you were the manager.) That’s progress, better than selling something like make-up, which I don't even WEAR and cannot imagine ever selling.

I am thinking that, at this juncture, my obsessions look more like this: spiritual insight, multiple forms of non-toxic, affordable housing, creating desserts that won't hurt me when I eat them, Christians and anything having to do with them, the ultimate long underwear, purses, pants that fit, and nutrition. Now that’s a switch. To Hell with death (or Heaven; everyone is going somewhere and probably when you least expect it); sex is still on the list because I'm not dead yet and I'd like to be loved by somebody in a myriad of ways and only one of them is sexual; there will always be a war somewhere on the earth, either inside or outside of someone or someplace, and world travel will become more and more limited as the laws continue to hem us inside imaginary borders. I'm convinced that people will continue to shop, at least here in America, where we have been cultivated to do it, and that even after gas is too expensive for us to drive anywhere to shop, we will find a way to get things we don't need with money that we don't have. That, after all, is the true nature of obsession.

The Rainbow Gathering

This was a note to my friend Mark, who, instead of going to college after high school, went backpacking and hitchhiking for three years, seeing some of the most beautiful wild country in the Southwest, Northwest, and Canada.

I went to exactly TWO rainbow gatherings. The first one I went to, I still owned my VW bug, but I didn't take it because it was too expensive to drive. So I went to Kerrville Folk Festival and worked on the trash crew. It is better than cleaning toilets, but not by much. It rained for three weeks straight, I lived in a borrowed tent and slept in a borrowed sleeping bag. The first night that it rained, the tent started filling up with water, which I didn't notice at first, because it was on a hill and tilted. I noticed it when the water got to my knees and saturated the Coleman bag I was in with the flying geese on the flannel inside. They don't make bags like that anymore. Every day I hung the bag on a fence to dry, and every day, just as it was beginning to steam, it rained torrentially again, so the bag never did get dry, and I didn't sleep in it again, either.

I slept everywhere, anywhere I could find a dry place, with and without people, but mostly with people. Everyone else at Kerrville was doing that, too, because we were all so wet. Everyone’s shoes got wet, so we were walking around barefoot. I was doing the trash barefoot, so I got to ride around in a truck jumping on and off, and was totally freaked out when I saw maggots behind the glass where we dumped the trash in this great metal thing at one end of the property.

I wore a wool serape with a hole where the neck should have been. Everyone there started looking like refugees from a foreign land, somewhere way south.

People kept talking about going to the Gathering. I was curious, plus I thought that I'd meet the genuine Indian nation up there in Carolina, so I hitched a ride in Sticky Paul’s school bus. Sticky Paul was short, in great shape, and made part of his living walking on sticks at fairs and circus type events. His bus was on the dark side of the renovation it eventually got years later, when it had wood paneling and a shower in the back. Spiffy, it was, later.

The last day of the festival, the cook boiled eggs and put them out on the picnic table for us on the staff to eat. Cold boiled eggs and we were all cold and wet. Nobody wanted the little eggs. They just sat there on the table alone.

We all drove to North Carolina, to the mountains there. I camped with the same people I camped with at Kerrville, only one of them had gotten really sick and was puking in a hole they dug outside of the tent.

I had a backpack and my guitar. I, too, wandered all around and didn't feel like I fit in, especially when we drove up and there were all these young naked topless girls sitting by the road. The police had stopped us right before we got to the gathering because they thought they saw someone light up (they had) and I had to unload my craft bag, which was an orange fabric purse with beads, thread, beeswax, and shears in it, everything packed just so, and once it was unloaded, it was very hard to reload. I think traveling art supply kits are like that. Gypsies know how to pack down tight; then when they expand, their belongings often end up looking like an explosion