getting out of my own way

These are the things that have kept me from writing as much as I should so far this week:

1. hormone headache/fog
2. obsessive reading of Don Quixote so I can finish it (!)
3. sudden worry that I am not educated enough to write anything
4. googling writing programs/workshops/classes
5. reading the comments and testimonials of above and worrying even more that I don't know what I'm doing
6. staring at rain
7. making four hundred cups of tea
8. making lists of things I should write and submit to journals/magazines when I get better at self-discipline and writing
9. worrying about how much I should be posting online and how to find time to create interesting content
10. googling "how important is an author's social media presence or should you just lock yourself in an internet-free room and write the whole novel?"

It didn't occur to me until yesterday that most of what I am doing is self-sabotaging. Most of that stuff felt really important when I was doing it. But no amount of classes and credentials, social media posts, or cups of tea is going to write this novel. I'm fascinated by how often I get in my own way without realizing it. Novels get written by people who sit down and write. So as hard as it is, I'm packing up the worry and settling down. I can worry about all these things again after "The End."

I'll leave you with this gem from the marvelous Seamus Heaney.

"Getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm...the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.” ”

Seamus Heaney

xo
tonia

you just need something to eat

Last night I had a dream. I was driving down the country highway that leads to tiny town.  Suddenly I realized the windows were too fogged to see out of, and on top of that, I wasn’t wearing my glasses.  I couldn’t see the road, the signs, the intersections,or anything at all.  I began to panic.  Then, in that strange way of dreams, I woke up on the side of the road, parked at a red light in the city.  Somehow, despite my blindness, I had driven myself 30 miles and arrived in a traffic jam. And I still didn’t have my glasses. Terrified, I found my phone and dialed my husband, explained where I was and what had happened.   Cars were honking, I had to drive, but I was nearly blind.  What was I supposed to do??

“Don’t worry,” he said in a calm voice.  “You just need something to eat.”

I got out of my car (dream-world, remember), went into a store and got some food and ate it.  And he was right.  Suddenly, I was not scared.  I could think.  I could see!  And I drove myself home

We laughed when I told him about the dream later that day, but I’m always astounded at the psyche’s ability to reveal its own truth.  Even though I wasn’t recognizing it yet, I’m in a time of change, pushing into new personal territory. Of course I’m a little anxious, stressed, and scared.  Leave it to my practical husband to know what will help.

#

Recently, Anna Lovind wrote about the myth of the “fearless” artist.  The (masculine-dominant) idea that we should harness fear and ride it like a bull into our own creative genius.  What if, she suggests, instead of shaming ourselves into action, we recognize the message in the fear and tend to the need beneath it?  I love this insight.  What if we mothered our selves, recognized that sometimes all we need is an apple and a nap to give us the strength we need to face the next task?  

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world that values nurturing except in lip service and product advertisement (“You deserve a break today!").   Taking the time to nurture the self (or anyone) almost always registers to us as weakness and time-wasting because our world demands visible productivity, clock-watching, schedule-keeping, busyness, and monetary reward.  We have to decide to do this on our own and recognize it as an integral part of our creative and intellectual process.

People who succeed at their goals are the people who find the way through.  But that doesn’t mean we have to push and shove and wreck ourselves.   We can still get there with intention and gentleness and maybe, at the end, we'll have kept both our dreams and our wholeness. 

I know I’ve got a long drive ahead through unknown territory, so I’m going to put my effort where my mouth is and sleep an extra half hour. Eat something from the earth.  Show up on the yoga mat. Stretch. Get outside. Back off the wine and drink more water. Turn off the internet. Wear thick socks. Stay warm. Breathe. You?

it might help to be simple

The last couple of days I've given myself the outrageous pleasure of skipping the "usual order of things" and spending the first hour or two of the morning wrapped in a blanket, feet up, little electric fire going, tea in hand, reading. The rest of the house occupants are off to work or university so the house is deliciously quiet and still. This morning I was skimming through William Stafford's books on writing. I like his lack of pretentiousness. Ditch the need to seem intellectual, he says (in not so many words.) Just write out of your own place, out of your own expertise. I long ago decided that was the only way forward for me, I haven't any pedigree or experience that would enable me to write otherwise. My stories are mainly set in the Northwest, about the kind of people I grew up with, working class people. Some of them are curious and complicated, some of them stubborn, vicious, or unreasonably good. They're just ordinary people with ordinary encounters. You don't need to be an academic, or a diplomat, a scientist, or an artist to encounter betrayal, desire, failure, limits, freedom or forgiveness. All of these are readily mined from ordinary lives. But the world is a kind of grasping, upward thrusting place, and so I sometimes need to remind myself that I have stories worth sharing, that just because my place and my expertise lack a certain amount of cachet, it is still my own, and worth speaking from.

One of my Franciscan directives this year is "simplicity," and I've been thinking how much that word should really be tied to "humility." After all, it's often pride that drives us to own more, achieve more, do more. There's a certain lack of hubris required to be content with the old shoes, the good-enough house, the job title that sparks no one's interest. Saying no - to purchases/commitments/experiences/titles - requires a deep contentment and assurance that you are right where you need to be.

"It might help to be simple, and to listen," says Stafford in his marvelously spare way.

#

Today I have come to the coffee shop to write. Sometimes I need to shake myself awake, watch the people come in and out, hear snippets of real life conversations. Beside me a group of men are discussing tools - power saw, screwdriver, wrench - in absorbed detail. Behind me, a women's group is discovering self-comforting revelations in their well-used bibles. Strohl's Great Dramatic Sonata is playing in my headphones, but I am not interested in drowning everything out. I am training myself to be hardier, to write in a multitude of environments, under different kinds of pressure. More than that, I have come to watch and learn, for it is people who teach me to write, who teach me the tricks of conversation and mood, the gestures and tics that give characters life.

Novelist Elena Ferrante tells us that a writer's talent

...acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.

Elena Ferrante

I love this image, for in my mind I see a morning river, a single boat, the casting of a glistening net over the rocking waves, the grateful gathering in of whatever has come along.

#

"You must revise your life," Stafford told aspiring poets (a take on Rilke's line), and I can feel this with some urgency. It's been a couple of years since I finished my first novel. It hasn't found a publisher yet, but I am not discouraged about that. The longer I write, the more I realize how many novels I will need to write before I come anywhere near to mastery. I want to strip my days down to only what is necessary for this growing, this maturing; take off the layers so I can get right down to the art. Lately, that urgency has been accompanied by the shimmer of fear. There are walled off places within myself, there are things to know about myself that I have yet to uncover.

#

The mood in the coffee shop has shifted with the noon light. The crowd has turned over, leaving a quieter mood, a flurry of tapping fingers as people settle into work. I am hungry for more than coffee, so soon I'll go home to the quiet and make my lunch, start working on the next part of my novel while the laundry spins in the washing machine tub. In this section of the story, I am trying to understand how a good person might make peace with someone who does not know how to love. It is a common problem. Sometimes I sit by the window and think of the people I know, the ways they have chosen to face that kind of thing, the ways they didn't. Just before I wrote this out, one of the women behind me said loudly, but with great tenderness,

"After all these years I am just trying to listen to him..."

I've collected this in my net, her words, her tone, and I will add it to all the other things I am just now learning to know.

work, in progress

They've torn down the old apple trees and the thicket of blackberries along the trail.  In their place are sections of chain link fence held together with orange construction tape.  Our town is growing.  The airport needs a new access road.  Warehouses will go up, businesses will move in; more houses will need to be built.

So much of life feels like it is going the way of the fields and the apple trees right now.   The planet is at the mercy of unchecked prosperity; culture is trying desperately to keep up with technology and rapid change; our bodies are reeling under the weight of industrial pollutants and foods.  Personally, we are facing the reality of a truly empty nest, trying to imagine what marriage, what life itself, will look like in a pared down environment.  Some days I feel like my hands are clutching sand.

~~

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"My work is loving the world," Mary Oliver wrote. When we first moved here we made ourselves promise to notice the landscape.  To really see it before progress changed it.  We set out to appreciate the open fields and hedgerows, the stands of trees along the rambling creek, the stillness of all that open space.  I know the curves and hollows of our trail by foot because we've walked it nearly every day for years - in the freezing cold, the rain, the fog, the heat.  We've even walked it in the dark with only the light of the full moon.  Day by day it has become our own.  Not in the sense of physical ownership, but through familiarity, and understanding.

The changes are hard to take.  I was angry after the loss of the thicket and the trees, the wide fields. And there's a part of me that's angry that I can't keep my children near me forever.  It is natural in us to feel jealous, possessive, of what is beautiful and good.

~~

There's a book I've been reading slowly, about the first Oregonians.  The ones who walked this land before my ancestors arrived to cut down the trees and make farms, dam the rivers, cut in roads, build power plants and fast food restaurants, kill the wolves and over fish the salmon.  The piece of land that our little town inhabits used to be an annual meeting place for the Northwest Tribes.  I think of them lately, how it was to watch others encroach and change, to watch the things they loved being stolen and - to their minds, at least - ruined.  How do you find the grace to live in the middle of such a painful dismantling and not give up hope?  I don't think they knew; there is no answer in the book I'm reading.  There is no sure answer in my heart.

I keep going back to Mary Oliver:"Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."

This is important, I think, this matching of work with standing still, with astonishment (and in her first line, with love.)  Lack of these things seems to be at the root of so many of our problems today.  How can you preserve what you are too busy to see?  What you do not value, let alone love?  To train ourselves to focused wonder, to unembarrassed cherishing, to standing still and seeing, and to consider such things our life's work.  Maybe that's a way forward, even if it's not a solution to the loss.

Before the bulldozers came this fall I watched a red-tailed hawk pirouette over these now broken fields.  She wasn't hunting, she was playing.  I stood and watched her for a long time.  She dove and swooped, bolted upwards and then floated down with her wings wide-spread to skim across the surface of the tall grass. Over and over again she danced, drinking in the goodness of the sun, the air, those shimmering fields.  I came home and recorded it in my journal, the abandonment, the sheer joy of it.  The words are still there now, and as soon as I read them they conjure for me again the beauty of that morning.   The bulldozers have taken the field, but the hawk and her dance, the joy, are my own.  Today when I passed by the same spot, I searched the sky for her but she wasn't there.  The field was full of tire tracks and churned mud, the footprints of progress.  But along the edge, where the fences wobbled, was a bright stand of tansy and the red-brown tendrils of the blackberry vines that are never deterred for long.  I smiled to welcome them back, to encourage them to find the gaps, to stake a foothold in our changed and changing world.

becoming available to yourself

Recently, I pulled out my journal to see if I could remember when I started working on this new novel.  I found the answer back in the July pages.  The months before I'd been wrestling with the balance between what I felt were two distinct callings.  One required availability, the other - writing - required isolation and focus.  I couldn't see how to make both of these callings work, so all through the month of June I am writing out an explanation to myself about what I think is the correct choice: availability.  The writing must not be important in the long run, I say to myself.  It's always about people, it's always about showing up.  In June, there is a sense of relinquishment.  I can remember the feeling of release, a certain peace.  Writing would wait.  Then in July, a succession of unexpected events.  These were small things:  conversations, decisions by friends, a gift from someone close, a paragraph in a book.  These were sudden and illuminating, like matches being struck in dark corners: Oh, I see.  By the end of that month, I had decided that I *must* write, even if it was just 250 words a day.  I would inch my way along both trajectories.  I told other people about my decision, committed myself, made it hard to back out.  I made it to 10,000 words, 15,000, 20,000.  At that point, the landscape began to shift.  Decisions were made apart from me, obligations, relationships sifted, time opened up in a new way.  There were more small things.  Every book I picked up - some I'd bought years before and left on the shelf only to randomly select them again now - was the story of a woman coming into her truth.  Every time I grabbed a magazine, it was a woman telling how she made the hard choice, how she chose her path and stuck with it even when it meant disappointing others.  Friends who all along had been counseling "availability, availability" began to say "it's time for something new."   I began to admit things in the journal I'd never allowed myself to say.  Things I wanted but hadn't given voice to.  In the space of four months everything heaved and buckled, became new ground.

What's interesting to me about all this is in hindsight, I'm not sure if the changes were  inevitable and I was just awakening to them, or if the changes came in response to my decisions.  When I look back, its almost as if this life had been lying in wait for me to choose it.  Each step I've taken has been met with a surge of reassurance, clarity, and confirmation.  But I sense that if I had not taken the steps...if I had stayed on the path I was already on, there would have been reassurance and confirmation there too.  I'm almost certain of it.  That scares me a little, to think I could have just gone on with what I knew and what felt comfortable, that life itself would have risen up and affirmed that choice too.  What might I have missed had I not taken the small messages, the little match flares that were revealing another way?  May Sarton suggests it:

"The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up."

I have felt this stagnation, an underground current pulsing, not allowed to find release.  When I think of so many women I know, I am struck by how their deep thoughtfulness, their tremendous strength and creativity is put to use holding relationships together, managing dysfunctional family members, being the emotional center of their homes or jobs or communities.  I cannot imagine where we'd be without such women, but I am also struck with the inequity of it.  What have we lost in terms of wisdom, art, culture, science, diplomacy, language, and much more by allowing ourselves to be available to everyone but our own selves?

It's something to think about.  Questions to ask ourselves in moments when we can be honest.  Step back, look.  What is pulsing underneath the surface?  What longing hasn't even been allowed the words to describe it?  What would you do if there was no one who needed your daily involvement?  There are seasons, certainly, when these longings and gifts have to take the background, but in my own life, they weren't just in the background, they were in a tight little box labeled "probably never" or "probably too late."  What about yours?  Are they somewhere they can be nurtured and watered even in a dormant season?

"And now we who are writing women and strange monsters

Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,

Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands

More gently and more subtly on the burning sands." ~ May Sarton

Sending love and courage to all my brave-hearted friends today.

tonia