Building Altars

An interview with Deborah Potter

The forces in our lives are constantly colliding—sometimes in ways that work out well and sometimes in ways that don’t. This interview series is an exploration of what it can look like to work with the collisions, rather than against them. By digging into how humans and nature interact– from our relationships with other humans, to those with our non-human neighbors, to our relationship with ourselves to our relationship with the landbase–we can uncover how to best step fully into our role in the story of the world.

Today’s guest on the Ordinary Collisions Interview Series is fellow poet Deborah Potter. Deborah and I met thanks to our mutual friend Frank Inzan Owen who introduced us a few years ago. We had a delightful conversation about writing and books and poetry recently, and I’m so pleased to introduce you to her today.

Deborah is a writer, artist, preacher and poet whose work converges around one fascination: the intimacy between land, self, and Maker. She has written two books: Directions to Beauty: An Almanac for Personal Transformation and Probably God is a Bayou: Brackish Reflections on Life, Death, and Place. Deborah lives in Pensacola, Florida with one husband, six pets, and an unpredictable combination of five young adult children.

Heidi: Deborah, it’s wonderful to have you here with us today.  To start, I always ask the same question: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)?  

Deborah: Thank you for having me, Heidi. Honestly, the only way this question could be more relevant to my life at this stage is to increase the number of collisions. In my book, Directions to Beauty, I describe the collision of midlife, death of loved ones, children leaving the nest, and COVID as a personal Big Bang that shook the foundation of my life, resulting in deep spiritual, but also really practical changes. 

Heidi: Big bang indeed! I’ve had a chance to read some of Directions to Beauty and, wow, what a perfect storm. How are you navigating the conditions this collision is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices? 

Deborah: Though certainly I have missed opportunities to do this in the past, at this moment in my life I was ready to do—as you say in your opening— “work with the collision rather than against it”. When COVID happened I had already been desperate to leave my job for a long time. I had, over ten years, felt increasingly strangled by it and alienated from myself. Among many dissonances my job required of me, one was to travel almost all week, every week. For someone who now openly describes herself as a homebody, who likes nothing more than her feet connected to Earth, and the surge of electrical current I feel when physically connected to the people, creatures and land I love, this reality was increasingly an out-of-body experience—like I was just floating over my life rather than in it. When planes stopped flying and clients said “don’t come”, it was a relief I still am challenged to describe—though I keep trying. It wasn’t that I didn’t have to make hard choices after that. I mean, the planes started flying again. It was that I had been given the grace, a small taste of remembrance of myself, the Earth—all the richness and detailed beauty of the world. I think of that taste now as the crowbar I used to finally break the lock on that world and let myself out. I feel guilty too, you know? So many people lost and suffered so much during COVID, and so many people long for the opportunities and provision my job provided. Ultimately, though, I felt I had to honor the truth of myself however I was able. This collision gave me the courage and passageway to do that. 

Heidi: Reminds me of a line from my book, Collisions of Earth and Sky: Live your life in ways that tell the truth. So often not an easy feat—even discerning what IS true for you can be a challenge sometimes. But here you are, honoring that truth.

What a gift to yourself, and ultimately, to the world. What has this collision taught you about yourself? The world? 

Deborah: So many, many things. Books of things I’m still trying to write myself into understanding. In the pause of COVID, I began walking my little parcel of land. (I live on a recently rural two-acre plot in a suburb of Pensacola). There was nothing dramatic to see—no epic landscapes, rugged ground or rushing currents—just a weedy, northwest Florida yard. I started looking down and looking closely, walking slowly, audaciously rejecting the constant internalized demand for doing. What I discovered was life teeming, reproducing, blossoming, rotting, literally singing, dying and resurrecting beneath my feet. I started noticing and collecting unglamorous bits of earth—weeds with interesting or beautiful patterns, fungi in crazy shapes, seeds or leaves in subtle colors. I felt like the earth was trying to speak to me in a tiny voice, like God was providing a one-on-one tutorial on the beatitudes. I began making altars out of these little lessons and this is when I began to learn about myself, really, and what I know of the world. This pause and the time building altars forced me to look clearly at how deeply I had been willing to betray myself, imprison myself with this culture’s speed and commitment to comfort and fashion, its collective anxiety about keeping up, about winning some undefined race. I learned I have a deep belief that, at its foundation, the world is this extravagant, abundant form of art, that life is a sublime experiment—so that fills me with hope. I also learned something harder—that human culture struggles to accept the contract of life—that it comes and it goes—that we are petrified of its impermanence and so, in my view, is constantly trying to build walls of human-made things, constantly trying to cast our own image onto the world—make our mark, so to speak, incessantly trying to outrun what haunts us—which is that this experiment of beauty also includes pain, that we will come and we will go and so will those we love and that none of the plastic we proliferate into the world will change the state of its impermanence and protect us. I learned that most of our culture is imprisoned to this collective delusion.

One of Deborah’s altars.

Practically, I learned that navigating this big bang successfully required intentionality. A big part of that for me was asking for guidance and support in the form of a spiritual director. My friend and co-walker, Frank Inzan Owen, with utmost gentleness and keen insight, was absolutely essential in allowing this collision to bring forth something life-giving and healing. For me, reconnecting with land and each other, seeking thoughtfulness and truth and trust, has become a model for how we start to heal as people and as a culture. I can say it has been healing for me.

Heidi: Building altars: What a beautifully healing and grounding practice. There is so much truth in everything you’ve just said. Thank you for saying it—the idea that beauty is big enough to hold pain one to hold close.

Now…tell us about a collision you explore in your latest work!

Deborah: In Probably God is a Bayou, I explore what happens when we collide with death, or are grazed by it, maybe. I was sitting with my mom one day—with whom I have been recently reconciled after a long estrangement—when she confessed she regretted much of her life, that she had been unable to see she was loved, unable to feel it, that she was always looking for it somewhere else and therefore hurt a lot of people. 

This confession tapped into a deep sadness for me, and fear. As I said, I have this core belief that life is fundamentally a gift. The idea of wasting days and years and decades of the most exquisite gift ever conjured—really shook me, tapped into my own grief, my own feelings of self-betrayal and regret I felt for all those years of doing misaligned work. My mom was 80 when she made that statement. I started to think it was the proximity to her own death, her own reflecting on it, that made her finally able to see and consequently, to love and feel loved. So the question became—the question I explore and play with in the book—“What does it mean to see and how do we do it, before we are 80 and the time left is short?” This question also necessitates an exploration of what blinds us and how we confront what I mentioned before—the truth of our impermanence with clear eyes and open hearts.

Heidi: I love a good powerful question, and “What does it mean to see?” sure is one.

This is one of the body practices from 12 Tiny Things, a book I co wrote with Ellie Roscher—An Invitation to See is offered in the communication chapter.

What else would you like to share about your current projects? 

Deborah: In addition to the books I mentioned earlier, I’m also finishing a long poem entitled When Owls Call: Eulogies for my Youth and the Planet, and a chapbook, Poems from an Un-manicured Yard.” You can find excerpts of my work on my Substack, Building Altars, and at deborah-potter.com, and in the upcoming issue of “Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art.”

Have a collision you’d like to explore in this space? Send me an email at heidi@heidibarr.com.