“     … Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.”

“New Year’s Poem” by Margaret Avison.

Margaret Avison was a Canadian poet I had the good fortune to actually meet years ago.  She died in 2007 after leaving a valuable legacy to those to closely observe small moments.  Often, her poetry demands much of me as a reader so I take her words in small sips, remembering a comment made by Joseph Zezulka, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario and friend of Avison, who famously said: “Her poems were not snacks, they were full meals.”  Stuffed full of too many holidays, my writing self needs Avison, along with everything else, in tidbits at the moment.  But how necessary is the return  to words and work.

Not sure my digestion could handle a full word meal just yet,  I am also grateful to Lexington poet Sherry Chandler and one of her first blog posts of the year where she mentions “small stones” as a way to write our way into January.

There, she links to  “The January Mindful Writing Challenge: A River of Stones,” a call to write a daily “small stone” during the month of January.

What are “small stones”?  The site says: “A small stone is a short piece of writing (prose or poetry) that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. …The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.”  This sounds like a good way to enter back into the work after a time away.  In a testimonial, one of the people who adopted the discipline of small stones says:

“…Several times I’ve had the thought that I absolutely don’t have the time or mental space or energy to stop and notice something outside my driven daily preoccupations, to compose even this tiny ‘small stone’ of words. But I keep finding that it doesn’t eat up time or mental space; on the contrary, time stops and new space is created.”

Here’s to each of us finding ways to create new space in this our new year—the best way there is, through our words.  Even beginning with sips or snacks, we’ll soon be back to those satisfying, full meals.  And as we get our creative momentum back, those words  really will build slowly, helping us create the new year.  What an image it is:  to conjure up that whole river of words our regular work will become.

I am blessed by having had in my life several configurations of writing circles. I highly recommend them. Wherever I have lived, I have found kindred spirits who write, who listen and who keep me aware of the changing life patterns. Currently, I write with two different groups—my KaBooM sisters in Lexington (all of them publishing writers) and the Crones in Frankfort. (old friends and family)

On the last evening of summer the Thursday Night Crones, as we often called ourselves, gathered. The last time that this journal group met (back in mid-summer), we promised to do it again soon—to not let time get away from us; and we do gather as frequently as our lives permit. It is not the same tribe, but it is the same spirit.

We began in 1992 as a cadre of mothers and daughters who gathered at one another’s homes once a week for about consecutive 15 years. On Sept 22^nd we gathered on the porch at PenHouse Retreat Center. Among other old friends, I sat to write with two of my daughters. Alaina is 28, and Roxie is 36. They were 8 and 16, respectively when we began to write together; I was 38. It is hard to believe that this particular configuration of women and I have been writing together in the evenings for 20 years now.

After we write—usually three times all using a similar prompt—I listen to the round of voices, and I feel grateful for the way words on a page have kept us sane all these years. We have shared who we are in deeply personal ways. We have given voice to the wild ones within us, to memory and longing. In our now bookshelf of stacked journals, we have begun to write short stories, poems, novels, to longing through sorrow and ecstasy. We honor the passages, mourn the losses, celebrate the renewals, toast the possibilities.

I’m certain that as I was writing I was not conscious that I was ever working on  this or that book; although, looking back on it, I see that those journal pages were a riffle of flowing language that watered three books of short stories. It wasn’t literature I was seeking at the time I wrote; it was sanity and the only way to find it was laying down one word at a time, one breath at a time.

I think of that two decade process of writing as we pause this night during sunset. The group goes outside into the yard at PenHouse to watch the chimney swifts dive down into the darkness of their home at night. (Yes, we have rooms available for the swifts, too!) They become a metaphor for the act of writing as I watch them sweep across the page of sky, gathering night and tucking it under their wings. They fold night into their bodies and carry it with them down the chimney. In the gray evening sky, they look like clots of words being laid down on the page. A few of them straggle along, leaving meditative pauses in their flight, or perhaps line breaks. Then again, the birds as words cluster together, swirl and fall quickly. There is beauty in their patterns.

I know that these birds (and my cronies) will be leaving soon. Roxie and Alaina will come back whenever we meet. Glenda at the end of autumn has to go back to Alabama. She left an earlier configuration of our group to take a job at the university there. Debbie, a visitor to PenHouse and our group, will return to Louisville, but has promised to come back. I have also moved away several times (to Berea and Lexington) and then returned. Several of the other old-time group members are absent tonight, but our gathering whether in thick or thin continues.

This journal writing, like the migration pattern of swifts, also has its season.  Now that the light is waning in the sky, the chittering birds will soon leave for the rainforest of the Amazon. Our words, too, go out into the air, floating on currents of thought. We gather in our community, and reach out to continue at times to gather in more. The writing together over all these years has changed us. We have grown, we have flown, and we have returned again. The center holds us together—a communion of ideas among kindred spirits.

I filled a page—no problem—but when I re-read it, the idea I thought was going somewhere just…wasn’t. So I tore that sheet off and started again. Words, lines, paragraphs, a page, but again when I looked over what I had written it was disappointingly trite. Another page to tear off and get rid off. At this point the frustration really kicks up. There are so many things I need to do. I can’t afford to be pursuing dead ends. Time is precious and I want something to show for it when I set aside an hour to write during a busy day.

My impatience comes about in the midst of being busy with the new (to me) work of teaching a class on world religions. Ironically, I’ve spent weeks steeped in the spiritual ideals and common practices of a wonderful variety of faith traditions, yet it has left me in this urgent, scurrying state of mind. What’s more, one of the ideas I taught this week was a notion from Daoism called wu wei—a kind of effortlessness, or acting without strain. It refers to living your life sustained by the Dao, a life that puts you in harmony with your own nature and that of the world around you.

Daoism, as I’ve told my students, teaches that below the strivings of conscious effort is a power greater than we are, a power that we can draw from if we let ourselves. Wu wei yields access to the rich levels of creativity beneath the surface of our minds. It allows the abundant resources for creative work to move through us, so that we become a vessel for deeper and better work than we could ever accomplish with the strivings of our own merely conscious effort.

Action follows being, according to the Dao. So to focus on the busy, busy of our lives is to miss the point. Driving ourselves to act without attending to our state of being keeps us disconnected from the source of creativity. The work we do will flow most easily and be of better quality when it emanates from the source that sustains us, no matter what we call it.

If only I could keep that in mind! So I’m writing this post as a reminder to dwell in a better place than I found myself earlier, to dwell in that deeper strength and more profound creativity. Or at least to try. I think it will help with both the teaching and the writing.

May you experience wu wei as you work, too.

I am not a jock. I can hear my friends and family laughing at this massive understatement, but I make it to underscore that I am the last person one would expect to use a sports metaphor. However, I find myself thinking about the phrase, goal tending, and how it applies to basketball and the life of an artist.

In basketball, goal tending is a foul. Wikipedia defines it as ” the violation of interfering with the ball when it is on its way to the basket and it is (a) in its downward flight, (b) entirely above the rim and has the possibility of entering the basket, and (c) not touching the rim.” It goes on to add that “in both NCAA and NBA basketball, goaltending is also called if the ball has already touched the backboard while it is above the rim in its flight, regardless of whether it is in upward or downward flight.” Clear as mud right?

I remember my first college basketball game. I was a freshman at the University of Kentucky. My date was a member of the UK track and field team so we sat in the athletic section. I watched in amazement as my date transformed from the thoughtful, slightly shy boy I knew into a raving lunatic, swearing at the referee, questioning the parentage of various players on the opposing LSU team. One of the moments I remember most came when the referee called a goaltending foul on UK. I asked my date in confusion, “Why aren’t they supposed to tend to the goal?”  My date gaped at me, clearly wondering how I made it into college with such a fundamental gap in my education. What can I say. I was a basketball virgin.

When it comes to an artistic career, I think goal tending is an absolute necessity. There are fewer clear, defined landmarks for the arts than there might be in another career. It is necessary, therefore, that you not only create your own goals, but defend them from the many distractions and detractors that come with the messy process of living.

I ran across a journal the other day that I kept while participating in a workshop using Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artist’s Way. For one of the exercises we had to write down at least three secret desires for our work as artists. I wrote out my wishes, thinking that they were far-fetched and unlikely to come true. I wanted to have my own show, I wanted to land a large commission, and I wanted to have my work displayed in a public place. Imagine my surprise when looking through the book three years later, I found that I have fulfilled each of those desires.

Although I had not thought of that exercise in those three years, I believe that the deliberate act of writing them down pointed me in the right direction to succeed. By writing down my desires, I transformed them from wishes into goals and placed them into the back of my mind. My subconscious tended to those goals even when I was not thinking of them with the result that I had a show of my work at Beaumont Inn, I landed a large private commission, and I now have a quilt hanging in a prominent space in the Mercer County Library. Slam dunk! How’s that for a sports metaphor?

Poem by Snail Light

“Trust the Process,” I tell people all the time, quoting my friend and mentor, George Ella Lyon.  Trust the Process, I copied out and put up by my computer when I began to seriously give myself to writing.  Did I know what it meant?  No – not any more than I knew what it meant to be a mother when I gave birth to my first child more than thirty years ago.

Oh, I had inklings (“inklings” – the perfect word, a scribble of knowledge, a sense of what’s needed – ink – but no clear idea of what to do with it!), but I had to be taught by the day-to-day doing and failing and despairing and going on.  Writing has taught me how to write and keeps on showing me the way.

Though I had people like George Ella and Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, to point me in useful directions, I often resisted what I most needed to hear.  Like this, from Ueland’s book:

“So you see the imagination needs moodling,–long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.  These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as ‘I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.’ But they have no slow, big ideas.  And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”  [p.32]

Years of being told to “quit that daydreaming” had nearly knocked the moodle impulse out of me.  But on days when I can recapture it, when I can slow myself down, I find that those “slow big ideas” are still there, clothed in images as water clothes itself in towering clouds on summer afternoons.

Some of you will resist this mightily (as I did), and your poetry will be as good as it always has been.  That’s about it.  You will get a good idea for a poem or follow an impulse that works itself out quickly in line and with images or sound, and you will be happy with it, and it can probably even get published, and that is that.  “Why moodle?” you’ll ask.  “It seems a waste of time, and I’m not getting any younger.”

Let the poem belong only to you for a while.  Or, better yet, put it away after you have drafted it – even if only for a week—and then take it up again.  Meanwhile, let it stay on your mind.  Jot things on the back of old envelopes – notes to the poem, reworkings of lines, a new image or detail.  Bring these to the poem as you’d give a gift to a newborn.  Try them on the poem.

Talking and busyness fill our days for the most part.  If, by chance or design, you find some time to simply be with your writing, please do not allow guilt or untimely interruptions to draw you away.  Trust what flows into the work from beneath.  Then go to work with inspired joy and abandon shaping it!

The wisdom of this attention to our intentions becomes immediately obvious when you consider that “everyone knows the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”  Extend that aphorism and it becomes clear that no matter how bright one’s beginning, to accomplish the journey the traveller still make take each one of those thousand steps.    For some of us, each step requires a new commitment, and our KaBooM goal-setting time serves that purpose well.

This need to continually re-set my purpose is reinforced when I practice yoga with my wonderful teachers at the local Y.   There, we begin our classes with a mindful setting of our intention for that day’s practice on our mats by making our commitment physical.  We hold our hands in prayer position and place our thumbs on our foreheads, because that’s where intention starts.  We lower our hands to our hearts, because that’s where an intention begins to live, breathe, and have being.

From Sacred Source Yoga: http://sacredsourceyoga.wordpress.com/photo-gallery/ariele-meditating-in-nytimes/

Finally, our hands come back to our foreheads to “set” that intention.  When I set my goals at KaBooM meetings, I do my best to articulate goals that will live in my heart and prompt steadfast effort so that I have something of substance to report the next time we gather.

When I set my intentions for my writing work, I am taking seriously the dreams of my heart and the yearnings of my creative self.  At the root of the word “intend” is “tendre” which means, in part, to stretch.  There are times when the goals I set for myself feel too difficult, too great a stretch.  Yet by continually setting and re-setting my intention to make that stretch, the creative power available to me is a constant, wondrous surprise.

I love my computer. It simplifies the physical process of writing for me. Editing is easier. How did we ever compose without cut and paste? Spell check, for all of its faults(and they are many), catches errors that the eye might overlook. The computer makes writing faster so that when I type, I can keep up with the racing thoughts that sometimes accompany creative energy. I find it easier to get my thoughts out when I’m not distracted by the feel of the pen in my hand, the drag of the ink across paper, or the shape of the letters.  As arthritis gradually eats away at my knuckles, typing is also less painful than writing by hand. Yet, even though the benefits are many, I still feel the need for hand writing. Why do I bother with hand writing anything when it’s so much more convenient to tap out a quick email and hit send?

Have you ever wondered why legal documents require a hand written signature? The answer is obvious; our signature is unique. Nobody else can sign our name the exact same way we sign it. Even talented forgers make tiny errors that enable experts to detect the difference between a real signature and a forgery. The same thing can be said for all of our hand writing. Dr. Rosemary Sassoon, the creator of the Sassoon series of typefaces, said, “Handwriting is an imprint of the self on the page.” Our handwriting is imbued with our personality in a way that a typed page can never capture.  I can look at something scribbled on the back of an old picture and know if it was written by my mother, my father, or my grandmother. I have letters from my grandmother that show the passage of time by the way her script began to waver as she aged but even wavering, it is still undeniably my grandmother’s handwriting. My father often typed his letters; as a businessman, he had ready access to a typewriter. But he always signed them in pen and ink and I still get a warm feeling when I come across an old letter with his signature at the bottom. The hand written signature connects me to my father in a visceral way that the typed pages don’t. I can see my father’s hand swooping, forming the “d” for David and final swoop on the end that crossed the “t” in Harter with the tail of the “r.” It’s unmistakably my father’s hand.

Recently,  I received a short, hand written note from a woman I have never met. This woman had seen a piece of my art work that is hanging in the public library in Harrodsburg, Ky. She was inspired to write to me to tell me how much she loved my work and she offered me some hollyhock seeds for my garden, the hollyhock being the subject of my quilted work. I was so touched by the note that I immediately called to tell her. I told her that not only did I appreciate her compliment to my work, I appreciated that she had taken the time to write.  She laughed and said, “That’s what we old women do!” I told her that it was more than that. She gave me something to save; something to read again when I’m feeling particularly discouraged about my work. I hope that writing by hand is not a dying art. I hope it’s something that we all will continue to do, not just “we old women.”  I can’t picture a stack of emails being saved with quite the same reverence as a bundle of love letters tied with blue ribbon. I hope that the hollyhocks will bloom next summer in my garden and remind me of the kindness of a stranger and the power of the pen.

One way to think of poetry is it’s a making that captures in literary form what might otherwise run down the drain with the dishwater.  Moments.  Images.  A glance.  New ways of seeing something familiar.  Considering that a miniature form might suit my non-poetic soul, this year I turned again to Gail Sher in her lovely book  One Continuous Mistake: Four Nobel Truths for Writers and her suggestion to write a haiku a day.  She suggested six months.  Fearing such a commitment too deep for a dabbler, I tried six days, and even in that brief span found myself growing more aware and open to fresh perceptions.

Sher’s introduction “Guidelines for Beginning Writers of Haiku” is elegant, simple, inviting.  She sketches the three levels on which a haiku works, and suggests a writer capture the “instantaneous now.“  Ah, I thought.  This is welcome discipline in the midst of my “too-much-to-do-in-too-little-time” daily race.Today I noticed the rain puddling—intense colors in the gray light—and a swelling gratitude for reminders to breathe deeply, settle, aim for clarity.

Which poems have you tried writing, or carried with you, to celebrate the month?

Patience and the Tiger

Weigh, hey, year three is it of this novel? It’s draft number three at any rate. Writing a novel takes endurance and faith and the patience to tolerate so many days that look the same: the screen ahead, the softening hips below, the sun rarely shining, the rain coming too often, the snow a bore. Writing a novel is like rowing toward the horizon. No matter how many times you crank the oars, nor how many months you have been at this labor, the horizon is still far away, and the shore has disappeared. There is nothing to do but keep on going.

Now, as a somewhat creative person, I like to make things. But the course of writing a novel requires so much patience that I find myself turning to other enterprises in order to feed my need for quicker gratification. (note: eating is not advised as a means of instant gratification. A novelist spends entire seasons in a chair, and blooms but not in a flattering way.)

This winter I tried drawing and painting to satisfy this need. As you can see from the photo I posted, I am quite an amateur with  visual composition. However, the delight I got from using color to make forms on a page was exciting and soothing. It quieted the internal, impatient tiger wanting to be finished with this novel right now. It kept my tiger distracted, purring as if my the brush strokes were petting its fur. If you are at sea with a novel, it helps to have a tiger on board, as Yann Martel illustrated so well in Life of Pi.

Today we are roaring across the waves and my little creative self has had some play and is quite happy to be in the boat, and the tiger has begun to eat up all the chocolates and the ladies in the painting are losing it, but that is the way of writing a novel.

I was really too tired to go find them, it takes a lot of energy to go out and round up creativity. So I rested a little once I got to a stopping place. I missed the faint sense of possibilities brushing across my skin, but figured I’d think about that tomorrow. I stared out the window.

But the next morning, in the shower, I found one in my soap. Sometimes it’s when you’re not looking that an idea turns up. For sure I wasn’t giving a thought to anything at all when I picked up my mandarin-scented bar. Maybe ideas like the smell of oranges, or the wholesomeness of soap. Hard to say. But anyway, there it was.

I felt better after that, for a little while. But pretty soon, one idea starts to get heavy. You can feel the weight of all the other companion inspirations it needs that aren’t there. One idea is lonely, and it starts to wonder whether it picked the right place or time to show up. You can hear it asking these questions out loud. It feels terrible.

I took a walk to get away. The nattering was just too annoying and besides, while I had been doing all that work I hadn’t put nearly enough miles on my sneakers. I tend to overrate thought and underrate movement. I needed to bring some balance.

It took maybe three blocks to forget about how my body felt about it and to just be a body walking. Striding along past houses and parked cars I had no agenda, not even exercise. I had nothing to think about and no desire for mental exertion of any kind. I can slip into that brain on vacation mode more easily than I’d like to admit.

So I can’t say I found the next idea. I think it was in the magnolia tree I walked beneath, and it let go of the branch just at the moment I passed by. But wherever it came from, suddenly it was there, and I hadn’t done a thing to make it happen. Just the opposite. Ideas are sneaky that way. They like to drop on your head when you least expect it.

I still wasn’t much in the mood to think about it, but I was happy that the first idea had some company. It made me feel like things would be all right. I kept walking.

If you like the idea of being productive by not thinking,  you might want to read the article, “Bother Me, I’m Thinking” by Jonah Lehrer. It’s about the value to creativity of not paying attention.