Once when she read my writing, my good college adviser from last year advised that I "go deeper." And though criticism is hard for me to take, it did cause me to think for a long time about what I might do in order to "go deeper."

In the past when I try to write deeper, it has meant I put more words on the page or try to add more details. But I think I have figured out what my adviser meant when she said this.

She wanted what I too want and what I already enjoy when I read. Depth means writing more in less words and thinking more substantially. Getting to the root of things is really what it means, and doing that before chapter ten. Doing that from the beginning or being willing to rip out the first nine chapters, starting with the core.

Yes, depth for me, true Maggie depth, means less words not more. It means taking a challenge that seems impossible, like the 300 pages my father hopes I write before he dies, and diving in.

Even rain on a tin roof is

Silent when deaf ear is turned up.

I hear the pattering percussion of this

Water falling down.

Is it raining? She asks.

By the open window,

I do what Friends do,

I tell the Truth to the woman

With only the Love in my eyes.

My sister once said she thought all people are lazy if they don’t have a reason to work. I think that is funny because she is constantly cooking up ideas that put her to work, even though she does not have a strong financial need right now. In a parallel world, I have been wondering if all people are hypocrites. Lately I have really been noticing the conflict in my life, especially how my thoughts and actions so often go against my convictions. Spiritually, in family issues, in my temperament, in my lifestyle my deeds are conflicting with my ideals.

For a long time I have called myself a Quaker, but I have been angry mildly violent. I have been thinking of myself as Pansexual, but in all my actions I am asexual and intimacy should be a beautiful thing. I want my birth family to know who I am and to support them and be supported by them, but I feel unsupported by them and consequentially negative towards them or negative in their eyes. I am on disability money and I have less money than I am used to this year because of an accident involving overpay; and my financial situation is awful right now to the point that I cannot go to therapy. I am bipolar and I know how integral therapy is for my life and vitality and even statistically speaking, my longevity. According my mother and temporary landlady I am “too intense” at times. And I agree that I am intense, but I believe it is more difficult to be intense than to experience it in a tenant or even a family member whom you love unconditionally and overpoweringly, which she does. I am a person who around alcohol and drugs is a teetotaler, but who has an addictive personality when it comes to coffee or television and in my heart of hearts, I hate television. I am conflicted about my father because I love him so much but I act like a baby around him, and I don’t know how to take control of myself when I am with him or even on the phone. Even politics, a subject distant from spirituality, is making me crazy because I don’t want to be aware of all of the horrors of the world anymore because this “sick sad world” is breaking me apart. Yet, a part of me thinks it is my duty as an activist and a person of this world to open the paper, help lead the rally against the KKK in my home town, and listen to Democracy Now! I feel the gas I use is red with blood and the money I spend still smells of the explosives used on the Mountaintop Removal sites from where all cash seems to pass and flow. This next thing is kind of funny, but it is the most important of all of these. My spiritual existence and the poetry of my life have tumbled down at least lately. These are the core components of who I am. These two things are being pummeled: my spirituality and her twin sister poetry. I am feeling lost in this respect. Is my spirit still here? I wonder. Can I bring back my poetry?

I want to be who I really am though, so badly. I crave Maggie more than any specific thing. I feel sometimes that other people’s voices are running my head and that I am walking in the wrong direction and I don’t know how to fix things. I have these wonderful days when I am entirely unwilling to recognize the conflict and hypocrisy in my life. Perhaps my happy times are causing me to forget this need for direction, a need that exists all the time. I need to draw a map of where I am going and where I am in order to be Maggie. I see Maggie so rarely. I need to draw a picture of who I am and hold onto it like it and keep true to myself, my spirit, my poet within.

Though all that I said is true, it also is true that I have never written anything that is not a poem. I walk and speak poetry. I am a poet, and a poem. I am a good hearted person. I constantly seek to do the right thing deep in my core. I make mistakes; I am human. One of my biggest mistakes is that I second guess myself and apologize too much and feel guilty for things that are not my fault. I even would be a good mother. I know that. I know who I am. I know what I perceive that others think of me, and I sometimes don’t think they give me enough credit. But my insecurities are less important than my appetite for beauty in language and environment. My spirit is full of kindness and when she stops crying, Maggie is still there always hopeful. Maggie is here and I am not going anywhere away from this body until death, and that will be in a very long time. I have always known that I am a child of God. It has been difficult to grow up in an atheistic family, to love God and be angry at God, even to deny God periodically. Now I know that God is in me. God is in everything from poetry to the mountains to every human that I know.

God and poetry are in me through everything I do and all that happens to me. My job is to preserve them and honor them. I am the one who needs to give myself credit for all the wonderful words I write and all the poems that I live.

The most meaningful thing I said in therapy today was as follows.

When I grew up in the family that raised me, though I am grateful for how they raised me, I felt living with them put a strain of guilt on any concept of spirituality or religion that I had.

Joey professed atheism the one time I asked him about his beliefs, and when he and Anna were in high school they both leaned this way. My father was outspoken as an atheist for a long time, and I heard his words on athiest rights and felt confused about what I should think. To his credit he wanted me to have a full chance to seek out and find for myself what I wanted to worship and believe.

My mother went to the Emmanuel Episcopal church and in my teenaged years I asked her if I could go with her. That beautiful church was the closest thing I knew to a place where people come together to connect with God and the Spirit. I loved looking at the stain glassed windows and to listen to the sermon, even if the sermon confused me at times.

When I began high school I felt confused about a lot of things especially because my friends were getting into things I felt were immoral like drugs and alcohol. I thought that since they said they were Christians but acted this way I had to teach them something. But I am not an atheist.

Daddy started going to Friends Meeting when I was about eight years old. And in 2001, I went to Monteverde, Costa Rica to live for two and a half months and discovered the Inner Light again in the Quaker Meeting there. I decided to call myself a Friend and a Quaker and though I was not sure I was a Christian it never seemed to matter.

When I came back to the States, to summarize ten years, I found that I am not a Christian. I did things that made me doubt if I was a Quaker either. Up until recently I have attended Friends Meetings and sought them out, but I currently seem to be evolving away from my Quaker identity.

In therapy today I told my therapist that when I was a child I felt I did not know how to explore my immense spiritual feelings and I felt squelched by a family that felt overpoweringly atheist. I know they did not mean me harm. They argued ideals, and I sought a different kind of meaning.

Last night I had a lot of time to sit and discern with just myself present, a gift that had been missing and needing in my life for a long time. As I thought with myself I grew aware that I need to stop letting the views of others impact me when it comes to the Inner Light or God. I am a vastly spiritual person and I there is something to be said about communing together with others who feel as you do about God.

As an end note, I am now thinking of trying out the Jubilee Church. My therapist suggested it might be right for me and I could tell she was called to tell me that and she knows me well and is a compassionate person.

The most important thing for children, Quaker or not, is that they have a way to get what they need about God. Just because I hungered for the Spirit and did not feel I was allowed it by most of my family then does not mean they did me wrong. I am here spreading my Truth and that is all that matters now. Everybody needs someone they can talk with about God, unless they are brave or encouraged to go straight to the source.

(For informaton on Jubilee see the following link: http://www.jubileecommunity.org/whatCreationSpirit.htm

I am a Turtle

by Maggie Hess

a short essay for Randall Roberts

Mom says that after turtles mate they cannot be transplanted away from their home or they will not survive. Turtles walk slow and move slow and their thought processes are slow, but deep. Mythology says that turtles hold the world on their backs. Turtles also carry shells on their backs and many can close their shells. Sea turtles do spend a large part of the year out in the ocean catching their food, but they have to nest in the same spot every year or their children die and they die. Turtles can eat under water though it puzzled Mom to think about exactly how. After all, like humans, they have lungs and need not breathe water into these lungs.

I have been drawn to turtles lately, to look at the box turtle shells that I find, to dig out my sister's collection of turtle things, because she too once was fascinated with turtles. Turtles seem a gentle bunch but not when you find you are some turtle's lunch. Around here there are snapping turtles, but all turtles snap as a way of getting food. Turtles are very good at biting into something they like and refusing to let go. I remember my family used to stop when we saw a turtle crossing a road and aware that people intentionally run over them, we moved them across the street in the direction they were going. Now scientific research suggests that any disturbance of a turtle's natural way could be detrimental to the life of the turtle. Moving turtles off the road disorients them. Turtles know where they are going deep inside, they don't need the opinion of others affecting them. Turtles like to spend time alone enjoying the comforts of the forbidden gardens they find, munching on heirloom tomatoes.

I see less turtles than I used to. That is why I am writing this. Turtles and people who love them seem at first to be endangered and problems in the environment do threaten them. But deep inside their shells, a turtle soul is a hopeful soul. And that is why I am a turtle.