Gremlin on My Shoulder

I am a little in awe of people who love to read but don't have any drive to write.  Sometimes, I wish could inhabit their brains. What would it be like to simply love a book without trying to figure out how it (the book, poem, essay)  works, so I can write it (my version) better?

Really what I envy is the idea of being rid of my writer's ego.  My ego is a snarky little gremlin on my shoulder that rolls her eyes at bad writing, but is often terrified by the prospect of writing a single sentence.  What would it be like to silence my gremlin?  I'm sure a great deal of mental space would be recovered just from being relieved of the angst that often occurs when writers think  about writing, (as opposed to just sitting down to write). Maybe, if I wasn't a writer I would take out my sewing machine more often, start jogging, or take up yoga.

Mornings are my favorite time of day to write and read, and I can't imagine giving up those moments when my mind is calm and flexible and for a few minutes anything might be possible.    The best time of day to read or write poetry is in the mornings, before the mind settles into the necessities of the material world--errands, bills, work, life.  That's the time of day when the blank page is the least terrifying, and distractions are the least demanding.

Besides, I kind of like that gremlin hovering on my shoulder.  It's not Duende or Rilke's angels, and it's certainly not a muse. It grunts and growls, chews up drafts when it's frustrated, and purrs when it's being fed a big bowl of poetry.  The thing is, I'm fairly certain that with some discipline and compassion my beast can be tamed.

April is the Cruelest Month, March is a Close Second

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain. -T.S Eliot, The Waste Land

April may be the cruelest month, but March may be vying for second place.  Longer days coupled with daylight savings time makes it feel like more is possible.  While that should fill me with hope, really it just makes me want to hide under a blanket.  The 6pm sun reaches through my kitchen window and displays the dust suspended in the air, lights up a long rectangle of dirt on the hard wood floor, and when we sit down for dinner it shines directly in my eyes.  I scramble up on the counter and hang a kitchen towel in the window to cut down the glare, and remember for the hundredth time that I should get blinds. Of course it’s not just the dust and the dirt, it’s all the things left undone through the winter.  It’s suddenly too transparent all the things I should have done:  read more books, submitted more work for publication,  used my sewing machine more, done more art projects with Morgan, gone to bed earlier, woken up earlier, exercised more, started yoga, gotten more organized, and played outside more.  Yet I don’t regret a single moment of this winter.  The only thing I could have traded was sleep, and well, sleep makes me a nicer person.  So while the snow is still covering the wild green, and before we Northerners fall into the spell of the midnight sun pushing us into a summer frenzy of doing more, I want to steal this moment to dwell on winter’s dark beauty. Outside my window, in the field beyond the tangle of spruce and alder, snow seems to come from nowhere and everywhere. In the evening twilight, the spruce circling the field are bright and heavy with the burden of the new white. The trees closest to my window protect each other from the wind, but even they give a sudden wave every few minutes.  More than anything, I want to contort this scene to mean something, because that’s what writers do.  But really it’s only snow falling making the trees glitter under the rising full moon. Inside my studio I’m wearing my down jacket because I rarely turn the heat up enough.  My fingers are cold too.  My mind wanders to a hen I witnessed peck a mouse to death.  Snow was falling then too, how surprised I was by the vulgarity and bloody insistence of the bird; I was even surprised by my own surprise.  I closed the door to the chicken coop, and returned to my winter walk home, back to my wood stove and hot tea. Of course, I never forget that winter’s splendor is foreboding: in the field beyond the tangle of spruce and alder, violence is not only possible, but is likely.  Eagles circle and prey for rabbit.  Moose are hunted by wolves. Lynx prowl and coyote are unafraid to stalk the neighbor dogs.   But for this moment, the snow falls and I’m warm inside.  The scene from my desk window is pure and inviolable.  All that’s demanded of me on such a winter evening is to stay indoors and sink inside myself. Trekking the wild interior of the mind can be as reckless as any adventure, but I am comfortable navigating my known regions.  I am distrustful of spring’s persistent invitation to join the exterior wild and do more.  As tomorrow is the last day of March, I wish you an easier April.

Scribbles

The other day Morgan, my 2 1/2 year old daughter, demanded that I stop writing.  We were working on a construction paper thank you card, and she was "writing" inside--one long line with bumps and loops for letters.  I, meanwhile, was writing a little message to her Aunt to slip inside.  Morgan noticed the disparity of her writing and my writing and threw down her marker.  "Mama no write."  I felt us pulling toward tantrum, and suddenly remembered my biggest fears when I was 3 years old:  1) I would never learn to read 2.) I would never learn to write 3.) I would never learn to drive a car.  As a small child I saw these things as the essential difference between myself and the grown ups around me:  language and transportation were what made grown up people powerful.

I suddenly felt like I was flaunting my ability to write.  Of course it must be frustrating that her words and my words look so different.  I stopped "grown up writing" for a few minutes and started writing like she was.  I told her how frustrated I was when I didn't know how to read or write.  She calmed down and started writing again. I eventually finished my little note.  But I think I saw her face flicker with recognition that I understood why she was upset.

Here's the thing:  for some of us that fear of never being able to write maintains a presence all of our lives.  The frustration of not doing it right  makes us write sentences every week, erase, write them over, better, and we do it again and again.  Our words take the shape of stories, poems, essays, blogs.  While we may have broken the code of language as children, we continue to manipulate language to bring out our highest selves...and our lowest selves; to grapple with whatever corner of the universe we happen to inhabit. We still never know if we're doing it right.  Writing can feel like one long scribble on a blank page.  However, even a scribble gives a blank page meaning, making the writer feel a little less intimidated by the blank page and a little more empowered.

A car helps too. 

Where the Mind Drifts

Oh my.  As I write the heater is out of fuel.  My glasses are sitting right next to my sleeping daughter.  I don’t dare get them for fear of losing these ten minutes.  What else is there to do?  At least I can make the words on my screen big.

This week as I was re-making the face of this blog, I couldn’t help think about the point of blogging.  My husband reminded me what an ugly sounding word “blog” is, like a snot ball or other phlegm.  I used to be put off by blogging; I considered blogs to be a reductive essay-diary. Some kind of less-than form.  A kind of embarrassing form of self-publishing. 

Now I’m more struck by how democratic blogging is.  Anyone can publish their thoughts without a lot of money or any go-between.  Of course this means there’s a lot of bad writing floating out there.  So what. For a lot of folks writing isn’t even the point.  People are taking the time document their lives and passions, and I can’t help but think the world is a better place when people attend to the things that make them happy. 

But what brings me to this blog? For me writing is the point.  Anything that engenders more writing in my life is good.  I start writing a blog, I drift to a draft of a poem.  It’s more productive than surfing the web.   It’s good to have a weekly post, and to have the audacity to put out something that’s not perfect.  I cringe sometimes when I go back and look at my over sights.  But that’s okay, it’s out there, I can fix it, and it’s evidence of me engaging in a writing life.

My posts are an effort to log some of the places my mind has been drifting.  And I’m okay with letting this blog evolve as need be.  Having an hour in the morning to myself to read and write is ideal, but honestly it doesn’t happen as much as I wish.  So I carve out moments here and there, and when I get that precious hour I take my notes and snippets and assimilate them, sometimes into a poem or essay or this blog.   

I hear the summons of my 2 year old.   Time to get my glasses now. Until next week.-Mercedes

If Not Persistence, Humility

I have always secretly wished I was a runner.  It’s not something I’m willing to make time for in my life right now, but I like the feeling of running on treadmill and going exactly nowhere, and knowing exactly how fast or slow its taking to get nowhere.  It’s a good meditation.  I love the feel of my heart and lungs gasping and looking at the clock and thinking ten more minutes.  I can do it for ten more minutes.  And unlike writing, which weirdly enough often feels like I’m not doing anything, running leaves little doubt that I am in fact perspiring, working my body as hard as possible.  When I’m finished I feel like I could conquer the world.   And I’m still standing in the same spot.

An hour of writing can go by and it can be a little more difficult to tease out what exactly you accomplished.  There’s no need to go take a shower and change your clothes, you’re still stuck with yourself and there’s still more writing to do.  If I've been responsible and carried my notebook and note cards around with all week, I’ll sit down at the computer and walk away from my session of 2-3 hours with a new poem draft, a revision, a blog post, and maybe a couple pages of a story.  I own the world when that happens, not as frequently as I wish.  But more often whatever I've accomplished sitting down with my pen or keyboard is elusive.  It can feel like I haven’t been writing, but when in I check the dates on my documents I discover I’m writing almost every day. Curious.

Writing is its own kind of treadmill, without the glory of sweat or a fast heart beat. Any kind of commitment requires persistence and humility.  Persistence to keep p going, even when it feels like you’re going nowhere at all, and humility to keep your ego in check. I like to dwell on persistence as opposed to perseverance.  Perseverance presumes success—that if you work your brains out you’ll win.  We write because we need to write. We do the work before us, because it’s what’s needed to be done.  A writer friend of mine said to me this week:  I work so hard and I get so many rejections. The rejections don’t have much bearing on the quality of her work; she writes wonderful poetry.  It takes humility to receive  rejection and continue anyways. 

All week I've held the words persistence and humility in my mind like stones.  I roll them over in my mind not only when I’m writing, but when I’m going about the tedious business of living. When I’m looking for the mittens (again), telling Morgan to take a time-out for hitting me (again), or when I realize that besides my best intentions, we’re going to be late to the dentist (again).   It’s not about persisting to get what I want (an on-time arrival), but persisting in being calm and practical  and maybe even a little silly in my endeavor to live life with it’s myriad of complications and disappointments.   And when I falter, like when I was one large foot-stomping grimace after the time-outs were not working, I roll over the word humility in my mind and start over, try something different, or maybe just accept the day the moment for what it is:  beyond my control.

To quote Ms. Stacey from my childhood favorite Anne of Green Gables:  “Tomorrow is a fresh new day with no mistakes in it, yet anyways.”

You just got to keep going.