After the seasonal food-and-time-off debauch, I’m grateful for the turning of the year, though it’s slow going these past few days. To ease back into regular work, my practice is to turn to poems of the new year. This morning it’s these lines:
“ … 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.
