Kirsten Mustain, Author

Mark Twain

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:10:00 +0000

I’ve been reading the autobiography of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) – a hefty tome by most standards. One might say it is large enough to stun an ox.

Among many other things, Clemens has shown me the importance of personal memoir. It isn’t simply the supreme pleasure of feeling an intimate connection with a brilliant voice from the past. It is the historical importance of that voice. His wit and insight are fresh to this day. And his description of the world he lives in and the people who inhabit it bring it all alive.

So much of the history we are exposed to consists of dry textbook accounts of battles and laws. It is very illuminating to read a personal account of the era in which he lived. True human experiences cannot be revealed by dates and events. Actual thoughts, observations and feelings show the reality of the past.

The small details of everyday life are vividly rendered by the author’s hand. His description of his aunt and uncle’s farm where he spent a great deal of time as a child is truly magnificent. I almost feel as though I was there – not just at that place but at that time. Like I woke up on a fresh dew-covered morning and found myself transported to a log house in the midst of 500 acres of tobacco and woods in the nineteenth century.

Reading Clemens’ writing is like listening to him tell stories on the porch on a warm dark night. His face is obscured, but his voice is even and magnificently understated. He says the most brilliant things in the simplest terms. He is articulate and free of pretense.

One of his word riffs discusses the rarity of the unselfish compliment. He observes that most of the time when someone pays you a compliment it’s because they want you to do something for them. He noted that the only unselfish compliment he was ever given came in the form of an anonymous note. I am tossing the above compliments into the atmosphere in hopes that they will find him somewhere and he will know I have given them without expecting any return. He has already given me more than I could ever repay with mere compliments.

Reading his words assures me that I am not alone in this vast continuum of time and space.

I have never before thought of personal memoir as anything of particular import. Our world is bombarded with personal memoir 24/7. Case in point: this blog. And then there are Twitter and Facebook and on and on ad infinitum.

We’re all vying for attention with photos and commentary. The minutia of millions is posted every day for all to read.

This cacophony of words and images makes memoir seem cheap. Sifting through the banal and the frivolous to find a gem of genuine depth and importance is an overwhelming task.

But perhaps it will be an interesting historical record someday.

Back to the World of the Living

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:58:00 +0000

I have neglected this website for several months now - mostly due to my complete creative exhaustion after three plus years in the vampyric atmosphere at the Grove Sun.

For a very long time now I haven’t had much to say besides, “Plant that back foot firmly on your mat and engage your quads. Stretch those fingertips to the ceiling and breathe.”

Yoga is what to do when you don’t know what action to take next. It can focus your attention and carry you through times of upheaval and uncertainty unscathed.

I have been blessed since September with the opportunity to teach my practice to some of the best students any teacher was ever fortunate enough to teach.

Though the process has been slower than I wished, I have finally begun to recover my wits and my yen for writing. It is amazing the damage that a toxic work environment can wreak upon your whole being. The worst thing is, you probably won’t even realize the extent of the harm until you have gotten free from it.

As I write this today I am sitting in my home on the bluff looking out at a yellow-green lawn and thirsty trees. The heat is oppressive. Even the flowers, which I water every day, have a shrunken sere look about them.

But amid the suffocating heat there is an abundance of Spicebush Swallowtails. These handsome butterflies appear in Northeastern Oklahoma every year, but they are much thicker than usual this season.

Butterflies symbolize transformation and joy. With this many of these lovely-winged creatures flitting through the air, something good must be just around the corner.

Symbolism is the language of nature and of God. It is built into our brains at the most primal level. Once you become aware of it, it becomes simple to read.

Spicebush Swallowtails are beautifully delicate creatures. Their wings are dark brown. On one side they are adorned with a shimmering sort of sky blue at the bottom. On the opposite sides of their wings, beneath the blue, are orange spots. Since orange and blue are complimentary colors, this is a balanced butterfly.

Balance is always good.

The brown, in its positive aspect, represents grounding and new growth. Blue stands for happiness, calm and truth. Orange represents warmth, joy and creativity.

So, even though the summer seems to pause on the brink of eternal flames with this overwhelming heat, there must be a lovely change on the horizon.

Snow Day

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:05:00 +0000

Up here on the bluff, the snow swirls and eddies around the eaves.

Common grackles have gathered in the oak trees and overtaken my bird feeders., sending cardinals, nuthatches and chickadees to the far branches.

The wind gusts and swoops.

Snow falls soft and light.

The neighboring bluff is still hidden completely behind a sheet of white, but the lake is visible again – mirror-like below, reflecting the black skeletons of the trees.

And the far shore has become visible again, glowing white in the bright shroud of midday clouds.

Nature is an awesome force.

I am miniscule beneath this swirling storm. It will have its way and all I can do is hunker down and hope for the best.

It Came from Outer Space

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:25:00 +0000

I have been avidly watching the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series lately.

It reminds me of my discovery, at 10, of the book Chariots of the Gods by Erich Von Daniken. I read it far into the night, finishing it in one sitting.

My mother checked on me that night to see why I wasn’t sleeping. She asked if the book had frightened me and I replied, “No, I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

That is one of the key values of ideas that are outside the mainstream paradigm – they open the horizons of the mind whether they are “true” or not.

Chariots of the Gods was precisely what I needed to read to get my synapses popping when I was ten.

The more alternatives we humans can imagine, the more alternatives we have access to in our lives.

I cannot say that aliens from other worlds did not influence our distant ancestors, nor can I say that they did. I wasn’t there.

I can say that there is a plethora of evidence that flying machines did exist, as well as a host of documents that refer to beings that came from the stars.

Of course, these are all discounted by mainstream archaeologists, who choose to either ignore evidence they can’t explain or dismiss “anomalous” evidence by saying that there weren’t any civilizations capable of doing these things at that time, which is very foolish indeed.

Megalithic structures seem to be proof positive that something very sophisticated was happening in ancient times. Our own civilization appears to be incapable of building comparable structures.

Mainstream archaeologists are so attached to their current paradigms they are quite unwilling to consider the evidence at hand.

For instance, to say that the Sphinx is not as old as the physical geological evidence suggests because, “There wasn’t a civilization that could have built it during that time period,” is ludicrous. If it exists and it is that ancient, then clearly there was a civilization capable of building it at that time. We just don’t know what civilization it was.

One of the most dangerous threats to knowledge is the very idea that human beings “know” anything. Once we “know,” we lose the ability to recognize new evidence if it suggests something different.

Even ancient alien theorists can fall prey to this kind of thinking, however.

Although I love these shows and I respect and admire all of the people who are willing to be branded as lunatics by mainstream archaeologists in order to further our knowledge of the past, there is one assumption they still seem to make based on mainstream archaeology’s dogma. That assumption is that our distant ancestors were “primitive.” Just because those ancient humans explained the events of their lives with different terminology – say, “gods” instead of “alien visitors,” for instance, does not actually mean that they were primitive.

If races of beings more powerful than they were did, indeed, arrive on earth in chariots of fire and teach them new things, those beings might well be viewed as godlike, even by more sophisticated humans.

We cannot, in point of fact, know how “advanced” those ancient humans were.

It is clear from their writings that their worldview was vastly different than ours. However, “different” does not automatically translate to “more primitive.”

For that matter, we have translated their texts without knowing the finer details of their dead languages. The subtleties that they would have taken for granted could be entirely lost on us.

If archaeologists in the distant future were interpreting our texts without understanding the idioms and figures of speech we use on a daily basis, they might be quite mistaken about what those texts actually meant. A phrase like, “raining cats and dogs,” for instance, would be completely misinterpreted.

I would argue that what we call “mythology” is actually a more sophisticated form of storytelling than simply relating what we might call “facts.” Mythology illuminates much deeper truths than mere facts can impart, which is not to say that mythology cannot also be factual. Symbolism speaks to human beings on a primal level in addition to its more superficial meaning.

Therefore, the ancients were practicing a deeper form of communication when they put their “myths” into writing.

I have long thought that the UFO phenomena of today is a reaction to human beings moving away from belief in god toward belief in science (not that the two are actually counter to each other). UFOlogy is, in itself, a type of mythology.

Whatever these beings are they have not, to my knowledge, explained themselves to us. The fact that we interpret them to be aliens from another planet may or may not signify.

They could just as easily be inter-dimensional travelers from a different earth plane and/or supernatural in character.

I guess the main thing is that we really don’t know . . . But I am thankful that there are people out there who are actively pushing the borders of our knowledge and helping to redefine who we might have been as well as who we are now.

A simple walk

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:37:00 +0000

It is a fine fall day at Dragonback.

The leaves have begun to change in earnest and the frogs, pleased with last night’s rain, are singing random solos among the trees.

In the springtime the frogs sing in multitudinous chorus to herald the awakening of the natural world. Now, as the season winds down and they prepare for a long sleep, they are more solitary in their songs of praise.

I took a walk in the woods today – something I haven’t done in a very long while. And I wondered why I don’t do it often, since it just requires opening my door.

For so many seasons now I have been wrapped up in the unnatural pace of the human workforce and I have neglected the things that are most important to me.

"Not everyone can take a walk in the woods."

A friend of mine said that to me many years ago when we were strolling through an old growth Michigan forest.

At the time I wasn’t sure what he meant. Walking in the woods is a pretty simple activity, after all.

It wasn’t too long after that, though, that I went walking with another person in the woods. The walk was my idea, and the fellow who came with me was rather reluctant. Once we found the path and began our stroll, he seemed to be compelled to make lots of loud noise and generally undermine the entire purpose of a walk through the woods – i.e. peace and relaxation.

Some people are intimidated by the woods.

You can’t walk there without admitting that there is something larger than yourself. Something that does not move at the speed of the human workday. Something that sets its own rules and its own time. Something mysterious and unknowable.

So walking in the woods doesn’t just require a good pair of shoes and some bug spray. It requires the willingness to let go of the familiar manmade world for a little while and slow down to a more natural pace. It requires the acceptance that you are not in control and that human beings are not all-powerful after all.

A walk in the woods is the perfect way to remind yourself where you really are in the world.

What a gift. I think I’ll go again tomorrow.

Visiting Vultures

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:22:00 +0000

Autumn has begun its gradual golden descent to winter here at Dragonback. The leaves are still mostly green, but there are definite patches of yellow and red emerging all around.

Nature is a master artist.

Watching the leaves change is rather like watching the moonrise. The change is imperceptible when you are looking right at it. But if you look away and look back it seems sudden.

Common grackles travel in huge flocks this time of year. They fill the trees, squawk and cackle, and cause clattering rainstorms of acorns below.

Yesterday I glanced out of my upstairs window to find that a black vulture had perched upon the railing of the second-story deck. I had never seen one so closely before, and I crept stealthily into the room so I could get a good look.

Vultures are really underappreciated creatures. After all, the world would smell a lot worse if carcasses were left to fester everywhere. Vultures keep it clean. They do the job no one else wants to do.

One thinks of vultures as being rather clumsy and ungainly, but this fellow had a certain grace about him, despite his bald black head and his dull black feathers.

I recently read that vultures are more closely related to cranes than they are to eagles and hawks, and I saw, in the shape of his head and the way he perched, the unmistakable evidence of his crane ancestry.

He turned one bright brown eye in my direction, and as I gazed into it, I was struck by the intelligence there. An inhuman wisdom was reflected in the depth of that eye. I could not fathom the depths of that alien consciousness, but I wished I could. I am certain he was possessed of knowledge that I have no words for.

According to animal totem expert Ted Andrews, the black vulture relies on its cousin the turkey vulture to spot food. Once the turkey vultures have found a carcass to feed upon, the black vultures swoop in and take advantage of the turkey vultures’ superior sense of smell, sometimes even chasing them away from the food they have found.

Indeed, I have often seen one or two black vultures circling among six or more turkey vultures.

Their flight seems effortless. Vultures can stay afloat without flapping their wings longer than any other bird.

All of this, according to Andrews, points to a talent for achieving what you want in life by remaining still and expending little effort – by allowing things to come to you instead of chasing them.

Of course, vultures are obviously symbols of death and rebirth as well. So, even though my cousin who happened to be visiting said he thought it might be a bad sign to see a black vulture perched upon your house, I think it was a very good sign indeed.

You can see death however you choose. It is an end and a beginning.

Summer is at an end. A new season has begun. Best let the past go and look toward the future.

The Limitless Horizon

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:39:00 +0000

Now that I have recovered from my initial anger at the ugly ending to the toxic situation that had become my normal mode of existence at the Grove Sun, I must say, Whew! Look how big the horizon is out here in the world!

Blessings come in many forms, and this one, ignominious as it was at the outset, is already yielding all sorts of wonderful realizations.

Upon reflection, I think it is always a mistake to share the things one writes in anger, and I would like to apologize to everyone for posting in haste, so to speak. It was not my intention to assassinate anyone’s character and I know that my friends are intelligent enough to understand that there are always many sides to any issue.

The truth probably falls somewhere between my perception and my former boss’s perception.

That’s how life is. It is never all about you, even though it feels that way.

It is true that the Grove Sun was a bad fit for me. I am actually a poet and fiction writer and I have never had any great love for “the news.”

I do have a lot of journalistic training, but only because everyone considers that to be the only practical side of writing.

For the most part, I did dedicate a great deal of time and effort to the job, mostly because I felt that the community of Grove deserved a good newspaper. I still feel that way, and I hope the community gets what it should have.

Unfortunately, for many reasons, which I will not list here, I had lost my dedication and enthusiasm for the job over the past year and a half.

It was time to go, but I felt completely trapped in a horrible situation and I forgot that I had some control over that.

(As a good friend of mine said just this morning, “Your horizons were always that wide.”)

Fortunately, I was given a great gift – a one-way ticket out.

I actually never applied for a job at the Grove Sun. Both times I worked there it was because someone called me and asked me to step in due to difficult circumstances.

I certainly don’t regret the experience. The first time I was there it was totally fun. The second time, not so much, although I would never give up the friends I have made over the past three and half years.

I have always loved the community of Grove, and it always made me happy to be involved with the people who make that community so special.

I am standing at a crossroads now, and I haven’t quite decided which direction I will choose, but I am certain it will be much more suitable for my nature and my talents.

In the short term, I will be updating this blog much more regularly, so if there are any among you who miss my column, feel free to read a less constrained version of it here.

Thanks so much to all of you for your kindness and support. I have the absolute best friends and family anyone could ask for.

Am I Wrong to Say This?

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:51:00 +0000

Oh what a difference ten years makes!

The first time I left The Grove Sun, back in 2000, there was a party attended by about 35 people.

We drank wine, and Gerald Stone made a short speech about the three years I had worked there and ended it by placing one of his wild ties around my neck. I also received certificates of appreciation from the Grove Police Department and the Boy Scouts of America.

Yesterday I was fired on the spot after my boss, Cheryl Franklin, read the following column and took it personally.

This column never went to press. However, since I got fired for it, I am going to print it here.

Am I right or am I wrong?

It is no secret that I have been wrong on more than a few occasions.

For instance, I recently embarrassed myself at a social function by identifying the song, “I Feel Pretty” as coming from the musical “My Fair Lady,” only to realize as I was driving away that, duh, the song is actually from “West Side Story” and the two musicals bear little resemblance to each other. I have seen them both multiple times, so how did I get that mixed up?

Just last week I looked at August’s full moon – the Sturgeon Moon – and identified as the “Harvest Moon,” which is actually in September. I knew that, too, but I guess I just got overanxious. I’ve never been very good with dates.

As I have noted many times, newspaper editors do not have the luxury of erring in anonymity. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter who made the actual mistake – it always falls to the editor to make sure it’s right. Regardless of everything else, it is the editor who will face the wrath of the unhappy administrators and the ridicule of her Rotary compatriots.

A very good friend of mine who has a penchant for popping off pithy sayings sent me a text today. It said, “Everyone wants a scoop; but being right trumps being first. Every time.” Truer words were never texted.

I might have just stolen those words and pretended I said them myself, but I do believe in giving credit where credit is due. If someone else does something good, I don’t take the credit myself. And if I make a mistake, I don’t expect to blame someone else for it, either.

Journalism 101

There are some who have suggested that getting a degree in my field was not the wisest career move.

I will allow that there are examples everywhere of people who have risen to higher levels than I have and gotten better titles than I have with less education.

Certainly many of those people are smarter than me, since I have not benefited (career wise or financially) from getting a degree and it is entirely possible that I will be paying for said degree for the rest of my natural life.

But I would point out that education does serve a real purpose, regardless of the title or non-title and salary or non-salary it provides.

Take the basic rules of journalism, which are so simple that to hear them repeated might make the most enthusiastic student yawn.

College professors, however, understand that there is such a thing as expertise. They have it and they are will to share it with others.

And, despite the tedium, I will repeat a few of the basics of journalism: Who, what, when, where, how . . . verify, corroborate, listen closely, do not print what you don’t actually know to be fact . . . Hey, we’ve all forgotten these things from time to time, even if we learned them in school.

You hear something that sounds really juicy come over the police scanner and you might just feel the urge to write it down as the dispatcher has recounted it. You might forget that dispatchers are repeating information that random people have told them over the phone and they may or may not have the actual facts of the situation.

About a year and a half ago I heard a call come over the scanner saying that a man had jumped off Sailboat Bridge. My ace photographer and I grabbed our stuff and ran out the door.

There were, indeed, police officers and lake patrol officers at the scene, and they were checking to see if they could find a jumper.

Also at the scene was a woman with very dark circles under her eyes who told me it was her boyfriend who had jumped and she wanted to give me the story. Hey, a journalist should jump at that chance, right? An exclusive interview with the girlfriend of the Sailboat Bridge Jumper. But, I decided to wait for something more official. You can call it slow or you can call it cautious. I prefer to call it common sense.

Something that everyone should learn early on is that some sources are more reliable than others. Credibility is everything.

There was no actual jumper.

The caller, it turned out, had thought he caught a glimpse of someone jumping over the railing in his rearview mirror as he crossed the bridge. A trick of the light, perhaps, or an overactive imagination.

Hey, it could happen to anyone. But it shouldn’t happen to a newspaper.

My clever friend also said, “The publication should never be part of the story. If it is, then there is something wrong.”

The newspaper is not about one individual. Ideally, it is a collective effort to benefit the community it serves. I hope we are able to keep that in mind at the Grove Sun.

Recognizing Shah Rukh Khan in America

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:53:00 +0000

The detention of Shah Rukh Khan is not the first, nor the most urgent wake-up call the United States has received of late, but it is far more important than many of my fellow Americans seem to realize.

Shah Rukh Khan is one of the most famous men on earth. His fan base probably well exceeds the population of the United States, yet the average American does not have a clue that he even exists.

Furthermore, many U.S. news organizations, in reporting the story of how he was held and questioned for two hours at the Newark, NJ airport, called him the "Brad Pitt" or"Tom Cruise" of Asia.

As if Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, or any American actor is the quintessential measure of a movie star.

The truth is that, at this poin tin time, Hollywood has no actor who compares to Shah Rukh Khan. Very few people possess the absolute and indefinable star quality that this man exudes on the screen. It is my humble opinion that American has not seen a movie star of his caliber since Cary Grant graced the screen with his magnetic presence.

Shah Rukh Khan is a REAL moviestar. In Hollywood what we currently have are actors. Certainly we have some amazing and excellent actors, and I don't wish to detract from their talent or their stellar good looks. I adore Hugh Jackman. Johnny Depp is delicious.George Clooney is absolutely fine.

But Shah Rukh Khan . . . well, what to say? He is one of a kind.

He is like young Krishna - Govinda they called him then - the divine avatar who played his flute in the forest and drew all the women from their beds with his beguiling music. Even though every woman answered his call, there was enough of him to dance with them all.

My sister, who is a Bolly-phile like myself, said it best, I think. She said when she watches Shah Rukh Khan she feels loved. It is the same for me, and billions of other women in the world.

I know Bollywood is an acquired taste for most Americans.

The first time I saw a Bollywood movie I was in an airport in Calcutta and I was appalled, yet fascinated. I found it cheesy and over the top (and honestly, the movie I saw, was not the best of Bollywood by any means). I was accustomed to the realistic and serious bent of American films. Nobody dances in American movies anymore.

John Travolta was the last really good male dancer to appear in an American movie. It has been a long time since Grease first hit the screen.

I have come to love Bollywood for the very over-the-top quality that first shocked my American sensibilities. Bollywood movies are not afraid to be movies. They do not pretend to live in reality. They allow the fantasy to be a fantasy. Everyone dances. Everyone sings.They are a lovely, three-hour escape from earth.

And Shah Rukh Khan, with his soulful eyes and his dimpled cheeks and his wonderful acting and dancing talent, is not just a star in the Bollywood sky, he is the sun. King Khan.

Yet he was detained a questionedat an American airport because of his name, which nobody recognized as anything other than "Muslim" and therefore "threatening."

Racial profiling is a fact of life in this country, nevermind that most Muslims are not rabid terrorists any more than most Christians like to blow up abortion clinics and beat up gay people.

Americans would do well to sit up and take notice of the other countries in the world.

We have a wonderful country, and I am proud of it. But it is not the only country in the world, and we, at the very least, should realize that we exist in a world community.

The greatest part of living in a community is the joy of diversity - the convergence of different minds and different ideas.

At the very least we could have the grace and humility to recognize that there is a whole world beyond our borders, and the people who inhabit this world are important and amazing, too.

The Subtle Meanderings of Morning Glories

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:56:00 +0000

Summer has shifted into its golden phase here on Dragonback Bluff ? right on the edge of autumn and far too hot for sanity.

I have realized of late that I cannot beat the morning glories after all. I am no match for the subtle power of invisibly burgeoning vines. Each morning more have sprouted in the rose bed to replace the ones I uprooted last night. They have stolen with silent stealth the stone footpath around the frog pond and wound their tendrils around the petunias and snapdragons.

If I leave this place they will surely cover the house and dismantle it stone by stone. Last night a spider built a huge web across my doorway ? an amazing feat for such a small eight-legged creature (okay, small compared to a rhinoceros ? rather large, actually, for a spider) to complete in such a short amount of time. A lovely pattern of gossamer, which was destined to be broken apart when the door swung open this morning and two dogs and two cats who would not let me sleep in burst onto the patio. It has been weeks since my last post, mostly due to the fact that I give all my time and energy to a job that does not even pay my bills.

In recent months I have felt that the path my life has taken has been leading me in the wrong direction, mostly due to the Grove Sun. Currently I am knocking at the door of freedom and waiting most impatiently for it to open.

My dear friend JB assures me that one is never really off one's path. He suggested that my sight has merely been obscured by the darkness of this particular stretch of road, and one day I will look up and see that my destination has been in front of me all along. He is a very wise man and there is a knowing at my center that says he is right. But it doesn't always seem so when I am in that miserable office.

My good friend GE recently asked me recently if I had any "superstitions." "Superstitions?" I asked.

"Yeah, things you believe that you know can't be true but you believe them anyway," he said.

"No," I replied.

Superstition is irrational. I have tried to rid myself of irrational beliefs, though others might think many of my beliefs are irrational. To me my beliefs are imminently rational. I don't believe things I know are not true, but I do believe things that other people probably think are not true.

GE illustrated by telling me about another friend of his, "Hooks," (not her real name, I suspect) who thinks it is a good omen if you see a hawk perched on say, a telephone pole. The hawk can't be flying ? it has to be perched.

In that case, I told him, I do have some superstitions. I just never thought of them as such. I believe that certain birds (and other various animals and objects) appearing at certain times tell me something about the currents that are influencing my life. Archetypal energies ? symbols ? the outer world reflecting the inner consciousness. The hawk has an existence ? a consciousness all its own. But it is part of the larger consciousness, just as we all are. And when I see the hawk, it is a reflection of something within my own consciousness as well as a reflection of the collective consciousness (as Jung called it) and the hawk's consciousness.

Lots of people might drive by the same spot and never see the hawk perched upon the pole. It does not exist in their consciousness and is, therefore, not an omen for them.

To me, if I see it, it is an omen of something that is happening in my own consciousness ? a subtle reminder of a certain type of energy or aspect of my existence.

The cosmos, the planet we inhabit, it is all consciousness. Existence is consciousness. It seems to follow that if this is true, then everything we encounter in the world is a reflection of consciousness. The morning glories. The spider web. The Grove Sun. The hawk. The excellent friends. Even McDonalds, GE.

And if the Grove Sun is merely a constructed constraint in the creator's consciousness, there has to be a way to break it open and get to the other side.