Gregory Ormson

Writer, musician, yoga-loving motorcyclist.

ANCHORS: For Kristen and Greg on their 25th anniversary

One good thing about Facebook is that every now and then someone reaches from the past and makes contact with us in the present. This is the case from someone that contacted me yesterday and I’m glad he did.

Today (Aug. 13) is Kristen and Greg’s 25th wedding anniversary. Back then, I was the officiant for their wedding when I was working as a clergy for the Lutheran church and my assignment was to Northern Michigan University. Marquette was my home for 12 years, and two of my children were born there. Except for the cold – which I can’t stand – it was the best place I ever lived.

Along with his Facebook note, Greg sent one photo from his and Kristen’s wedding ceremony. I had never seen it, and it brought back many good memories of my time as a YOOPER in Upper Michigan.

Greg reminded me that I played my ceremonial wood duck drum as part of their wedding. Playing a drum wasn’t that far out of bounds -since I started drumming with a set at 14 – but I made the drum I used in their wedding and have used it in many ceremonies. The oak body for the drum came from a large tree that had been struck by lightning. The deer skin on top was from the last deer my dad had shot in Indian-head Country of Northwest Wisconsin.

Text below is from “Anchors,” a piece about drumming.

ANCHORS

From early on, I heard text and sub-text in drums and memorized tom-strike patterns, rim hits on snare, and foot work for the high hat.… read more...

THE LATEST SCENE IN THE PLAY FAILS TO CATCH THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING

MUSIC from an Internet radio station plays in the background. Tablas and harmonium weave a soft melody. Sometimes a flute or sitar joins the song, and it pours over me like waves from the Pacific. It’s compelling to my ear. I try to concentrate on my pose, but sometimes I wander and follow the music.

I follow the sound, slow my heartbeat and ground my awareness. I’m still in class, but I imagine diving below and swimming deep. I listen closely and believe I hear the octopus changing colors. I open my eyes and breathe sound of the room.

In the tapas of my practice and its link to my muscle and sinew, a moment turns into a hour and my tribute to those who have gone before. An epic prayer from ancestors is on my lips.

Music stills me and I stay in the room until I hear my teacher give her blessing.. Her soft voice heaps a lavish blessing upon the gathered yogis which we accept and hold,  “May your practice bring strength to your bodies, clarity to your minds, kindness and compassion to your hearts.”

I take this and know that I have been brought around and past my edges. I will go into the world with slightly less border and boundary, inhabiting a conscience of wider circles and deeper draws of inclusion

I realize this reshaping is the nexus of my identity, the ring of fire connecting my courage and passion. I have been showered in wholeness and connected by the strength, clarity, kindness, and compassion of the words that take me to the heart center.… read more...

Below the Frost Line

When you engage with yoga, it will slowly render the surface-self transparent to its underlying divinity. It will build a foundation well below the frost line.

Yoga will not be televised, its moves are not dictated by chart, table, or graph; yoga will not whiten your teeth, but you will be astonished in moments of fluid inspiration, and the deep breaths you take will sustain apprehension of a true presence at once ecstatic and sublime.… read more...

MIDWEST INTIMATIONS

Port Yonder Press / Eastern Iowa University will be publishing its third volume of lyric essays this summer. Work by two writers is now online, including my essay, “Midwest Intimations.” The other essay online, link included is, “You Will Have a Son,” by Cindy Lamothe, an expat living in Antigua. Thank you Port Yonder Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eastern Iowa Review

MIDWEST INTIMATIONS

Let me pry loose old walls.                                                              
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.   

 Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.                                                             
 Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.  

  Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.      
   Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through the blue nights 
   into white stars.              

 –Carl Sandburg, 1918        

The American Midwest is a great nail in my body. Its rusty gestalt formed me, and my heart pumps iron history through my arteries and veins. The Midwest broke me and made me strong. It formed my hard-edged will and chastised me with ice.
I’ve lived in Hawaii, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Washington. I’ve traveled to 43 of the Continental United States and motored through Spain, Korea, India, Argentina, Haiti, Germany, England, and Mexico. I’ve rubbed elbows with people in the sovereign nations. Their names drip from my tongue: Navajo, Potawatomi, Lakota, Menominee, and Ojibwa.
I’ve embraced Midwest geography; most of it is not beautiful, however, some sites rival the rugged, purple Andes of Northwest Argentina, the coast of Barcelona, and the tumbling waterfalls hidden deep in Molokai’s rainforests.
The friendliest people don’t live in the Midwest, except once in a while we are the friendliest.… read more...

Latest article in Asana Journal

The Missing Link

On Feb. 3, 2014 my first yoga article was published in TheYogaBlog. Now, nearly two years to the day, the 30th is published in Asana Journal. Thanks for reading folks, and please pass these on.

You may not do yoga, but perhaps someone you know does or maybe someone you know is thinking about it. Right now my literary agent, Elizabeth Kracht, has my full yoga book and will be shopping it soon to publishers.

Put your best wishes forward for this effort not for me, but for words that will encourage many people to try something new for their health and well-being.

Thanks and ALOHA.

Here’s the link www.asanajournal.com/the-missing-link/

… read more...

COMMEMORATION

Allen Keith Ormson

MONKEY

Uncle Al (Allen) graduated from Barron High School in 1957, and then went to college at The University of Wisconsin, River Falls, where he earned a bachelor’s degree graduating in 1963.

Like many boys growing up with brothers, my father Dean, and his brothers Al and Duane engaged in sibling rivalry. At family gatherings, I heard stories about the time Uncle Al climbed up into the garage rafters, and by the use of secret sauce or brotherly incantation, lured my pops into the garage.

As my father walked underneath, Al dropped darts onto his head. Dad’s revenge was to put nasty stuff in Al’s chocolate milk. These are Wisconsin small-town stories that cement family bonds and create mythologies on whose reverberations family-members ride into the future. My pop and Al became close in later years, something that often happens when siblings grasp the depth of blood and jettison youthful rivalries.

In later years, inflated memories of Canadian fish stories and fantastic recitals of success in conquering Wisconsin buck fever took on Gaudian forms; and while uncle and pop were men of flesh, their noses grew longer at each telling.

Uncle began his career as a teacher, eventually earning his master’s degree from Winona State University and serving as superintendent of schools for 27 years in Rusk and Polk counties. But Al is memorable to me for his great success as a basketball coach. He took the small school Durand Panthers to the Wisconsin State (WIAA) basketball tournament finals twice during his coaching career, before the days when schools competed in separate divisions based on enrollment.… read more...

The Land of OZ in Wisconsin’s North Woods

Paragraph from an essay in progress, “Oz: Emerging Truth.”

yogi b   OZ sits me down where we’re accompanied by the parting grip of Old Man Winter. His dying is not pretty, he’s peeping around the corner in prurient self-interest, wanting to mess with Easter. But he can’t, so Old Man Winter becomes a disgruntled wizard, holding on to his wish for relevance. The curtain is pulled back and he’s busted as a fake. He’s not the all-powerful controller. I try to ignore the cold bearded man behind the curtain as I sit with him, the snow, and the wood stove. Outside, I hear him weep at his parting.

 … read more...

Midwest – from the Old Style Place. Cabin Writing

Notes from The Old Style Place                                            

Everything at The Old Style Place
remains upright, anchored in stubbornness. Its steadfast preachment to tenacity
has denied gravity its victory. This stubbornness was earned by hammer and saw,
shovel and plane, elements of willful ambition. Having endured tornado-force
winds, the yearly push and pull of cold and hot, nearby forest-fires and
electrical wiring that’s older than the oldest goat, somehow it’s still
standing.
It’s also resisted
“updates.” There is no indoor plumbing or bathroom. To leave it all
behind, I walk outside to a small outdoor toilet where I encroach upon the
world of bugs.
Spider webs hang over the
doorframe. On a narrow window sill facing north, dead flies pile up forming a
grizzly pyramid to mortality.
First built in 1945 as a simple
framed hunting cabin, it remains a testament to quality. The two by four framing
boards really are 2 x 4, not the cheap sticks sold now that have been shaved
over time until what we call 2 x 4 is really more like 1 5/8 x 3 5/8.
Here, work finds me and tattoos
its truth upon my bones, and I unmask the lessons to absorb what I need to
learn. I sit at the metal table in the cabin’s main room and I’m reminded of
the hours my brothers and I sat here. We argued and competed. I cheated by
moving game pieces or hiding cards.
For hours,  we challenged one another in Stratego, Clue,
Battleship, Five Straight, Password or Jeopardy.
… read more...

Midwest Old Style Place (Am Writing)

I tune to WOJB for an in-breaking from another world. The indigenous
people speak in even tones, softly on the microphone, nearly a chant. Their
idiom camouflages a humor I sometimes get. 

Dead air, then a night-time jock speaks with refreshing lack of pretense, clear and simple. She says, “Good evening everyone. It’s Tuesday and I hope you’re having a good night. It’s Tuesday isn’t it? Wait a minute, let me check…. Oh, it’s Thursday. Ok then, I hope you’re having a good Thursday.”


I’m here to listen and to put my hands on all the stubborn things: the old Evinrude motor, the long-handled red pump, the Dixie stove, the Gibson refrigerator, the cast iron frying pans and then fish filet knives. “


I lift the pan and feel its weight, I
swing the knife from side to side
and feel its balance. I smell
leather casing for the J. Marttini
Rapala filet knife; I will test the
blade against a hair on my
forearm. Is it sharp enough to
slice arm hair? If not, I will whet the sharpening stone and slide that knife in one direction, over and over, making an arc like a roller coaster. The Rapala will resist at first, but metal will yield and raise its edge.

WOJB turns its broadcast menu to music with Mountain Stage, and I love the songs. I wait for the next program and the dry unmistakable voice of
Garrison Keillor as he spins tales of life on The Prairie Home Companion.  I listen for his opening line, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon.”


He speaks of Norwegians in a cold land, sharpened
by hard work and manners.

… read more...

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