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.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The House Ghost, Revisited
Wyatt came home from school a few days ago and wanted to know where he could go to find out information about the history of our house. I told him my best guess, but of course I wanted to know why he wanted to know. Well, he said, I think we have a ghost. He went on to describe the things he sees--I already knew how, some nights, he thinks he sees lights hovering in his room (I probably shouldn't belittle his experience by saying he thinks he sees, but I do remember what darkness in childhood is like, how it's often your own mind that's haunting you, that it's always your own mind filling in the blanks when your eyes see something they misinterpret or don't completely understand.)
Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...
Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.
And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.
Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.
Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.
Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...
Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.
And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.
Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.
Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
My Solstice Fortune
I admit to still being in love with what I call the pagantides, those eight points of the wheel that come around in their regular pattern of long-balanced-short-balanced light and dark. I like midwinter, in spite of the things that drive me crazy about the season, the high heat bills, the back-breaking labor of clearing snow, the stupid-as-a-sack-of-hammers snowmobilers who, despite my requests that they not cross my property, continue to regard my land as their right-of-way. Up goes the fence!
But overnight (and uncharacteristically) last night, most of my chronic irritation melted away. I woke today with a delicious--and decidedly seasonal--craving for solitude. All morning the sky has been cloudy and low, although now a wind has picked up and the green pines and the gray branches of the maples are blowing around in it. The movement reminds me: things are alive. I woke wishing that my house were situated in the midst of a vast tract of acreage, field upon field and wood upon wood, and that I could be free to walk out through it alone with my thoughts and in danger of meeting no one. I like the energy of this, the shortest day of the year, and think that it naturally lends itself to going within, to deep thought and focused reflection. When I'm lucky enough to uncover the treasure that's patiently waiting there, I realize that it's the real thing I want for Christmas, and every other day of the year as well: the only thing on my wish list is that I be given an idea I can develop, and the time to develop it. And that I then be given the next one. Usually those discoveries come to me through writing--contrary to what a lot of people think, most writers don't know what they're going to say when they first sit down to say it. Or at least I don't. And of course, sometimes that treasure comes along through writing's corollary, walking (which in my experience is a kind of letterless adaptation of writing). That's what I try to tell my students: I love to write because when I do, when things are really in flow and your self is truly engaged with your self, it feels exactly like flying.
Today of course the reality is somewhat removed from solitude's ideal: my house is just one of a number of houses clustered around this block in the village, my son was awake early and so came downstairs practically on my heels, even now, as I write upstairs at my computer, the dog has arranged himself beside my chair making me aware of the other heart beat in this room besides my own. And at that moment, as if my writing a sentence about him had been the same thing as calling his name, the dog got up and nudged my arm and forced my attention away from these words for a moment and we both enjoyed a good long scratch behind his ears.
But, the urge to make a story out of the day has not passed, and despite the inevitability of the million other things I'll have to do today, there's still that long silver road spinning out in front of me to think about, and that road is the impulse to write, to make an image of or otherwise translate some experience that captures my attention at just that moment, or this one. As long as I can see that road the potential to walk down in exists, and everything else, the distractions or difficulties that rise up ahead of my getting there, are pretty much secondary.
Yesterday I spent the day with a kindergarten class, and while they colored away in a book full of illustrated Christmas carols, I sang the words to them and sometimes they sang along, as they could, and sometimes they stood up and did interpretive dance to the words. I never enjoy singing more than I do when it's for an audience who doesn't even notice that I don't sing well. I even amused them by making up my own words to some of the songs: "We wish you a merry CHRIST-mas/Get down off that chair!" (Prior to their class, I'd been reading a chapter in Stephen Fry's marvelous The Ode Less Travelled and reading about meter and rhyme always makes me start thinking in meter and rhyme.) This in turn made me remember, as I always do this time of the year, that there's a large body of work out there done rewriting the old Christmas songs to turn them back toward their pagan roots. I don't think there's anything wrong with this--at my core I'm a spiritual anarchist and anyway, I think that song-making is a fine occupation for this time of the year. I've already decided that this year, my solstice present to myself is going to be picking one or two favorite tunes (here I'm thinking Greensleeves and Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child) and making them my own, creating the lyrics that will fit the music and that will also reflect my own experience of this deep dark time of the year. That will be one part of the walk along that silver writing road today, just as writing in this blog space is also a part of that walk.
This morning I threw the I Ching and got the hexagram that translates, roughly, into "staying still," which is perfect advice, I think, for the day. Kind of a gifting message, I think: just sit still and see what your stillness attracts. let creativity come a-courtin' you. It's a happy state of anticipation. What do people do, I sometimes wonder, what do they think about, who do not seek out this state of inspiration? In my personal pantheon, at least, I arrange on the uppermost tier those divinites who grant that inspiration, placing them ahead of all the other spirits of weather, fortune, luck, and light.
But overnight (and uncharacteristically) last night, most of my chronic irritation melted away. I woke today with a delicious--and decidedly seasonal--craving for solitude. All morning the sky has been cloudy and low, although now a wind has picked up and the green pines and the gray branches of the maples are blowing around in it. The movement reminds me: things are alive. I woke wishing that my house were situated in the midst of a vast tract of acreage, field upon field and wood upon wood, and that I could be free to walk out through it alone with my thoughts and in danger of meeting no one. I like the energy of this, the shortest day of the year, and think that it naturally lends itself to going within, to deep thought and focused reflection. When I'm lucky enough to uncover the treasure that's patiently waiting there, I realize that it's the real thing I want for Christmas, and every other day of the year as well: the only thing on my wish list is that I be given an idea I can develop, and the time to develop it. And that I then be given the next one. Usually those discoveries come to me through writing--contrary to what a lot of people think, most writers don't know what they're going to say when they first sit down to say it. Or at least I don't. And of course, sometimes that treasure comes along through writing's corollary, walking (which in my experience is a kind of letterless adaptation of writing). That's what I try to tell my students: I love to write because when I do, when things are really in flow and your self is truly engaged with your self, it feels exactly like flying.
Today of course the reality is somewhat removed from solitude's ideal: my house is just one of a number of houses clustered around this block in the village, my son was awake early and so came downstairs practically on my heels, even now, as I write upstairs at my computer, the dog has arranged himself beside my chair making me aware of the other heart beat in this room besides my own. And at that moment, as if my writing a sentence about him had been the same thing as calling his name, the dog got up and nudged my arm and forced my attention away from these words for a moment and we both enjoyed a good long scratch behind his ears.
But, the urge to make a story out of the day has not passed, and despite the inevitability of the million other things I'll have to do today, there's still that long silver road spinning out in front of me to think about, and that road is the impulse to write, to make an image of or otherwise translate some experience that captures my attention at just that moment, or this one. As long as I can see that road the potential to walk down in exists, and everything else, the distractions or difficulties that rise up ahead of my getting there, are pretty much secondary.
Yesterday I spent the day with a kindergarten class, and while they colored away in a book full of illustrated Christmas carols, I sang the words to them and sometimes they sang along, as they could, and sometimes they stood up and did interpretive dance to the words. I never enjoy singing more than I do when it's for an audience who doesn't even notice that I don't sing well. I even amused them by making up my own words to some of the songs: "We wish you a merry CHRIST-mas/Get down off that chair!" (Prior to their class, I'd been reading a chapter in Stephen Fry's marvelous The Ode Less Travelled and reading about meter and rhyme always makes me start thinking in meter and rhyme.) This in turn made me remember, as I always do this time of the year, that there's a large body of work out there done rewriting the old Christmas songs to turn them back toward their pagan roots. I don't think there's anything wrong with this--at my core I'm a spiritual anarchist and anyway, I think that song-making is a fine occupation for this time of the year. I've already decided that this year, my solstice present to myself is going to be picking one or two favorite tunes (here I'm thinking Greensleeves and Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child) and making them my own, creating the lyrics that will fit the music and that will also reflect my own experience of this deep dark time of the year. That will be one part of the walk along that silver writing road today, just as writing in this blog space is also a part of that walk.
This morning I threw the I Ching and got the hexagram that translates, roughly, into "staying still," which is perfect advice, I think, for the day. Kind of a gifting message, I think: just sit still and see what your stillness attracts. let creativity come a-courtin' you. It's a happy state of anticipation. What do people do, I sometimes wonder, what do they think about, who do not seek out this state of inspiration? In my personal pantheon, at least, I arrange on the uppermost tier those divinites who grant that inspiration, placing them ahead of all the other spirits of weather, fortune, luck, and light.
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