One night last week I had a bad dream: I was with my sister and we had just discovered her old gray cat Moonshine, dead on the barn floor, and she wept and keened and managed to pick him up despite my urging her not to. In her arms the cat was rigid and thin, and in the dream I felt his deadness the same as if I'd been holding him myself. When I woke, I remembered right away that Moonshine had in fact been gone for more than twenty-five years; still, the dream had an air of urgency, of immediacy, that made it hard for me to convince myself it hadn't just happened. For two days afterwards I walked around thinking that it must be the start of an essay, somehow, but all these days later, nothing more has come of it.
It's been a string of nights full of dreams just like that, which is one of the things that my brand of insomnia does for you: I don't sleep well, but I sleep enough to dream, anxious dreams (no doubt because they're the products of a tired mind) that I generally remember since I'm always right on the verge of waking up, or have just woken up, or am lying in the dark thinking about the dream I just had while I wait to fall back asleep. At least it's been some time since I've been troubled by this. A year ago, I can see right in the entries here, I was plagued by sleeplessness, although then, it was rooted in my being stirred back into life after a long dormancy while I got accustomed to my widowhood. This year, who knows. I wonder if it's not a seasonal thing now. You'd think that the increased light would have a beneficial effect on me, helping me to emerge from the damp ground the way it's bringing my daffodils out. Instead, more light translates into more illumination of the things that trouble me, back in the deep recesses of the mind.
All day yesterday I tried to get here to write, mostly because it was the last day of the month and I didn't want to entire thing to have gone by with just one entry from me. But the truth is that lately, this is the last place I come to write: I'm still slogging along with the poem a day (#61 today, as a matter of fact) and most mornings I manage at least a short entry on the blog I keep on myspace, so if you don't find me here, chances are you'll find me there. And, having determined a course--finally, I think, the right course--of action to pursue as regards my essay-writing, the rest of the time I have to give over to this, pretty much goes to that.
And so I didn't manage to get here yesterday and honestly, because I didn't write it down anywhere else, I no longer remember what it is I intended to write about here. I hate to think that I have arrived on those shores of no longer being able to trust things to memory, but it may be that I have. I wonder how much of this is avoidable. Yesterday I taught in a middle school math program, one designed for the lowest of the low-end kids. As they worked over their sheets on simplifying expressions, they were encouraged--in fact, they were ordered--to use their calculators for the basic arithmetic functions of add and subtract. I thought to myself that surely, that reliance would weaken their minds. I thought about the old bardic orders, and their disdain for the printing press; surely, their argument went, that mind would weaken which was no longer required to memorize. But I can see the wisdom in keeping a small notebook and a pen always at hand. I always wonder what else I may have forgotten.
The past several days, when I haven't been tossing in bed, or having bad dreams, or trying to make myself useful in the classroom, I've been spending a lot of my time moodling around Jon Katz's wonderful Bedlam Farm although not, unfortunately, in person--the farm lies some four hours to the East of me. But his site is wonderful, the farm journal now a daily must-read, and it's got me thinking once more about the question of home, particularly as I look at it from a spiritual angle. I've concluded that what I really need is to create the outer set of circumstances that will more accurately reflect my interior world--when I read about Bedlam Farm I think to myself that that's what he's built for himself there, even though the journals mostly address that obliquely, with their focus on his hospice work, his photography, his sheep and, of course, his dogs. When I lived in New Hampshire I was fond of saying that I liked it there, but I didn't love it there, and mostly that was true. But the one thing I really did love was how I lived in a place where I could take a 6-mile walk--and often did--and barely encounter a car going by, let alone another soul. I miss that solitude. Where I live now, on a main street in a village that, for all it is small, is still a village, I feel hemmed-in, claustrophobic some days. To tell the truth, I don' t like it here at all, with the notable exception of one thing: I moved here with the thought that doing so would enable me to write, and write I have: when I look over the output from the last, say, thirteen months or so, I've written more in that time than I did in the previous thirteen years all put together. So now I need to find a way to synthesize the two.
I was just saying that to a friend last night, and remembering that made me remember what I was going to write about here yesterday. It rained; and first thing in the morning the rain made me remember other rainy mornings. That got me to remembering springs when I was in college, and how on some of those rainy days I wouldn't be able to help myself, I'd skip class and push my desk up by the window that overlooked the Commons in the town where I lived, and I'd sit there and write. I can remember the girl I was in those days, the writer I was at that young age, can still feel her the way I could feel the dead cat in the dream the other night--there, but not there. In those days I was hopelessly smitten with all things hopeless, which showed itself no where more clearly than in my love life, which was largely a series of disastrous entanglements with the sort of guy I'd always assumed I'd marry--someone artistic, controlled by creativity and instinct, someone a little moody, a little--or a lot--dark. Someone, in other words, just like me. Even when I'd been married for a couple of years and got to grad school, I'd still look around at the big shaggy men who lumbered in and out of my writing workshops, dragging around poems about their father-and-son angst or how they wanted to bang the papergirl and I'd think, why didn't I end up with someone like that? Luckily my own instincts outsmarted me there, and the man I eventually married was sort of the opposite of all that, and turned out to be just what I needed. When I met Dave I was involved with a guitar player, a man in whom musical talent was only outstripped by his capacity for substance abuse. Early on in our courtship, my soon-to-be husband tried competing with the other man on that man's terms, and so one night I had an hours-long serenade on Dave's old guitar while he strummed his way through--many, many times--the only song he knew how to play: House of the Rising Sun. Luckily, the musical talent portion of the pageant wasn't really part of the larger audition, and we ended up together anyway. Late in our marriage, after Dave had developed a real love for Americana music, I bought him a banjo one Christmas. This would have been the year before he had his recurrence, and so he got about eleven months in which he was able to pull the banjo out and practice--slowly, and more than a little painfully. It's actually a difficult instrument to play--those strings hurt, much more than any guitar strings do--and Dave never did learn to read music, so had to content himself with trying to teach himself through tablature. When his recurrence came, of course, the cancer rebloomed in his spine and robbed him of much of the use of his arms, and that was the end of his banjo days.
I sold the banjo the summer we left New Hampshire. I posted an ad on craigslist and a nice young couple, sort of throwback peaceful hippie types, came up from where they lived near Boston. The man picked the banjo up and took it in his arms and immediately it began to sing; he strummed, and picked, and cocked his ear and listened, and then he told me how he had a big family and they all got together frequently and played music together on the wide front porch of his parent's house. He paid me for the banjo what I'd asked for it, and they drove away again, and I was glad to think that it was going to go someplace where it would be played, and probably played a lot. I still have Dave's old guitar, which is warped beyond the point of being playable by now. But it sits in the corner of my bedroom and I think from time to time of covering it over with a beautiful glass mosaic, something green and gold and vaguely Arabian, although I have no idea why I think that, but I think that it would look nice, and that the guitar would enjoy its next life decked out in that garb.
And that is the story of two more of the musical instruments I've had in my life, and it was the rain falling down yesterday morning that made me remember it all. And the poems I've written in the last three days have all been about the rain.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Best Thing. The Hardest Thing.
(note: I previously posted this piece on the daily blog I keep on myspace; because I know there are different readers here, it seemed worth posting it again. Also, the fact that I haven't written here since January--I've been busy!--there's teaching! Mothering! Writing that daily poem [number 41 today, or it will be, once I've written it] has left me feeling rather guilty. I've never thought guilt was a terribly useful thing, but there you go, I seem unable to extricate myself from its grasp completely.)
When I got home it was time to take a look into the future, this time by way of the internet rather than my crystal ball. Or even my magic eight ball. Yesterday was the day admission letters went out from Phillips Exeter Academy--acceptance or rejection--and this year, the decisions were also to be posted on the personal accounts of all applicants, the one they set you up with when you begin the process so you can track what the office has received, what they still are waiting on. Sure enough, there was Maeve's decision, and the first line read: Congratulations!
A couple of months ago I sat here for a long time and struggled with writing my "Parent's Statement" which was about the final part of her application process. I still have a copy of what I wrote--what I don't have is a copy of the internal process that was going on while I wrote it. In fact I had put it off about as long as I was able to do so...in fact, it may be--I don't remember now--that it wasn't even a mandatory part of the process, whether or not I had any opinions one way or the other about her was likely inconsequential. I can't imagine any parent not having an opinion, but I know those parents are out there. At any rate. I wrote my piece about her, all the while painfully aware that what I was doing was trying to convince them to take my daughter away from me. I told them about her intense intellectual curiosity; I told them about the sponge-like way she soaks up learning and about how math is what's hardest for her, although that hasn't stopped her from signing up for the tough courses, or, for that matter, from pulling high 90's in them. I described her enthusiasm: gold in her pocket, I called it. I told them the story about how, as a sixth-grader, she spent two weeks away from us at Girl Scout camp and how the first day had been horrible, the second day had been a little better, and by the end, when we'd picked her up and were on the way home, she turned to me in the car and said you know, Mom, it's too bad I have so long to wait before I go to college, because I think I'm ready to live away from home now.
Finally I told them how difficult it was for me to write all of this because their saying yes meant my saying good-bye a full year before I'd thought I would. If you get to know her the way I know her, I added, you're going to miss her as much as I'm going to miss her. And, well, here's where we all get to find out how much, how deeply, that's true. I'm glad that I won't have to do any of this during the college application process, because I'm pretty sure at some point my own heart would give out and I'd start saying no, it's not true, she can't leave, give her back, make her small again and let's somehow freeze time right there, shall we? That's been the oddest thing about this impending change, how the shock waves from it have had the effect of knocking me back in time, in memory: since I found out, all I've been able to think about is the beginning, my pregnancy, her birth, what those early years were like, how different everything has grown. My wise friend Inanna wrote to me from Chicago last night: yes, first it's school, then it's off for the good job, then marriage, then grandchildren for you...it's called life, Anne. Of course it is. But true to form, I still feel as though I'm in dress rehearsal, not quite ready to go out there and convincingly deliver my lines. As of this morning, Maeve still hasn't decided whether she's going to go--making her pro/con list, there turn out to be more cons than you might imagine, given the opportunity this presents. Which ever way she decides to go, I'll of course back her up.
A.A. Milne wrote, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." Right before Maeve was born I learned of a superstition--Balinese, I think--that babies are believed to still belong to the gods for the first hundred days after they're born, and so are never allowed to touch the ground in that time. I'm superstitious anyway, and was never more so than I was around childbirth, and so for the first hundred days of Maeve's life I never set her down except when she went to sleep; on the hundredth-and-first day we made a great show of letting her finally touch the Earth. And then I was never away from her until the day I gave birth to her brother, when she was nearly three years old. What I'm saying is that somehow we've managed to stay close--freakishly close, as she sometimes says, Lorelei-and-Rory-Gilmore close. And so I know that Maeve's going to hate it when I write this, but here it is anyway: no matter where she goes and no matter what happens to her on the way, in an enchanted corner of my own soul a woman and her little girl will always be spending their day together in that little house on the lake beside the woods, where they first started out all those years ago.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
What Takes a Year and a Day
Back at the beginning of the year 2000, I was studying with a women's spirituality group and had, in the course of that study, all sorts of projects handed to me to complete, all manner of things to examine. In that first month of the new millennium--everything so strange, no one accustomed yet to dating their checks with this odd new century--the assignment came through to undertake a pilgrimage, following that same worn path taken by so many spiritual seekers through so many spiritual traditions. I remember the day I got that assignment: it was a bright, cold, January afternoon, and I was shivering in the room where I wrote in those years, a room with stone floors and windows on two sides. I looked out one of them at the sun reflecting off the snow; I looked at the thermometer, which hadn't gotten out of the teens for a week. I decided that it was too damned cold to even think about taking off anywhere, and for that reason, thought to myself that maybe I could make my own pilgrimage an interior one.
And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.
And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.
Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.
I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.
I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.
But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.
And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.
And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.
Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.
I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.
I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.
But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Five Pieces From This Sunday
1.
The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.
2.
I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?
3.
Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.
4.
Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.
5.
Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.
The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.
2.
I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?
3.
Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.
4.
Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.
5.
Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.
Monday, January 7, 2008
We Walk
...these nights, the dog and I, through the lowering autumn, through winter's coffin, through breathless spring, and latest of all we walk through the summer nights, deep in the dark, long after the last light of the sun has gone. We walk, and through the month the moon comes and goes, and comes again, and Orion hunts what we cannot see, and eventually stalks off to where we cannot see him.
I wonder what it is he is after.
On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.
We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.
There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...
I wonder what it is he is after.
On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.
We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.
There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Stories in Three Winter Voices
Frau Holle:
If you're a brave enough girl to jump into the well,
I'll send you back home with a story to tell
About what it's like, life with me here below:
How we tended the hearth, and tended the bread,
And saw to the orchard, and changed the bed,
And shook out the bedding to bring down the snow.
You can tell how you loved me, who is fearsome and old.
When you're ready to leave, you'll go laden with gold.
Tomte:
The tomte comes, the tomte comes!
Set out the porridge, warm up your drums,
And dance at your leisure on this, my own land.
Be merry at Christmas with pudding and plums,
Set aside your old hardships--the tomte comes!
The tomte comes! The tomte is here!
I'll fatten your pigs and help brew your beer,
I'll see to your mares, your best stablehand.
Let go of your worries before the new year:
Though winter is frightful, the tomte is here!
Knecht Ruprecht
Always remember how quickly I can
Get into your house that dark winter's night,
With ashes above me and ashes below,
With ashes to cover me, I creep in
And can see who's good, who's not, and who might,
Most benefit from getting a birch-rod blow...
Which brings me to my stick.
It's a curious thing, how that magical stick
Can show me the whole year just gone away,
And whether a child has been good or not,
Whether he's earned a gift, and the right to stay
In his bed, in his home. But if not...?
Well, and that brings me to my sack.
You see how it's empty, spun of rough cloth,
And I only use it to carry off
The worst of the worst, those who have stayed bad all year.
(If that is not you, you have nothing to fear.)
Heed well the Knight Rupert, heed well Ashen Nick!
If you're a brave enough girl to jump into the well,
I'll send you back home with a story to tell
About what it's like, life with me here below:
How we tended the hearth, and tended the bread,
And saw to the orchard, and changed the bed,
And shook out the bedding to bring down the snow.
You can tell how you loved me, who is fearsome and old.
When you're ready to leave, you'll go laden with gold.
Tomte:
The tomte comes, the tomte comes!
Set out the porridge, warm up your drums,
And dance at your leisure on this, my own land.
Be merry at Christmas with pudding and plums,
Set aside your old hardships--the tomte comes!
The tomte comes! The tomte is here!
I'll fatten your pigs and help brew your beer,
I'll see to your mares, your best stablehand.
Let go of your worries before the new year:
Though winter is frightful, the tomte is here!
Knecht Ruprecht
Always remember how quickly I can
Get into your house that dark winter's night,
With ashes above me and ashes below,
With ashes to cover me, I creep in
And can see who's good, who's not, and who might,
Most benefit from getting a birch-rod blow...
Which brings me to my stick.
It's a curious thing, how that magical stick
Can show me the whole year just gone away,
And whether a child has been good or not,
Whether he's earned a gift, and the right to stay
In his bed, in his home. But if not...?
Well, and that brings me to my sack.
You see how it's empty, spun of rough cloth,
And I only use it to carry off
The worst of the worst, those who have stayed bad all year.
(If that is not you, you have nothing to fear.)
Heed well the Knight Rupert, heed well Ashen Nick!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Year's Last
All day I've been skirting the edges of this space, wanting to sign on and begin writing but not signing on, wanting to write but not knowing what, wanting to say something with absolutely no clear idea how. Well. I finally realized I was ignoring my own advice, or at least what I always tell my students: it's a mistake, I say to them, to think you already know what you're going to say when you sit down to say it. You miss a whole lot that way, and I really mean it when I say it although usually, it's advice that's meant to quell their early-onset writer's block. I tell them it's okay--preferable--not to know, that you sit down and start anyway and see what happens.
So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.
But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.
I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.
And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.
The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.
Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.
So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.
In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!
So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.
So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.
But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.
I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.
And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.
The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.
Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.
So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.
In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!
So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.
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