Moving On

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The End and the Beginning

Today our local newspaper chronicled the history of believers who predict an apocolypse. It is true that we are in a time of increased seismic activity, and weather disasters are becoming commonplace. On tonight's news, they showed aerial photos from Mississippi where people are literally building islands to protect their homes. Nevertheless, hearing that some have quit jobs and spent irresponsibly makes me wonder what happened to make some of us abandon reason. I believe wholeheartedly in life's happenings as metaphor. I also espouse respect for the beliefs of others as long as they do not impinge or exploit. Is there plenty to worry about these days? Absolutely. Still, the light revealing six shades of green on lush trees is enough to make me pause and catch my breath. I have strong legs and good eyes. My dahlias, tulips, pansies, and bleeding hearts are in bloom--and the color variations are complicated and beautiful. On Facebook, a number of comments have been posted--songs for the end of the world--Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, "Let it Be" by the Beatles. Tonight we prepared fresh greens with lemon and olive oil, turnips from the farmer's market with a light dill sauce and a Pinot Noir. I can't imagine anything better as we sat on the porch, watching the waning light through lacy leaves. I remember a poem by Linda Pastan, "The Happiest Day"..."if only someone could have stopped the camera then/and ask me: are you happy?/perhaps I would have noticed/how the morning shone in the reflected/color of lilac..." At the end of my life, I hope to remember these moments--looking at your still handsome face, muted by the encroaching darkness, the small light on the wine glasses, a nod of purple hyacinth in the untended garden. This has to be enough.

Bleeding Hearts

Walking amid primrose, bleeding hearts and tulips, I feel colorless. All of us walk around as if we were ordinary when inside, ideas are churning and blood is pumping, nourishing our organs. I'm amazed when someone tells me something about myself that I didn't know---mostly because it often isn't true. All of us have internal and external selves and we humans make assumptions. I asked my class in Critical and Creative Thinking how many of them had experienced a misunderstanding through email or text message and just about every student raised his or her hand. We are clumsy at communication. Reading between the lines, we see a callousness or intimacy that may not exist. Even as a writer, I often blunder on the page. But I would take imperfect writing any day of the week. Notes, letters, postcards, and even emails are important to me. I learned as a young child to revere the written word. In a sense it gave me a kind of power I never felt I had when speaking. I still prefer writing to talking on the phone. I've learned to speak or read my work in public but I'm never completely comfortable. I just fake it better now. Like the amazing bleeding heart, a person's exterior can look very different from her interior or emotional state. I marvel at the complicated shape and color of this flower, realizing that we are also complex and our season of perfect blooming is short, not always fully realized.

Stinging nettles, Calla lilies

Nature is filled with paradox. On a recent walk to look for fiddlehead ferns, those furled beginnings that have to be picked only in the two weeks before they mature, open into the ferns you see by ponds, we also saw poison ivy, brushed against sharp branches. I can't describe the delight I felt finding these shy plants, curled up on the newly thawed ground. My daughter, Kira was with me. She is as familiar with the woods as she is with riding a bicycle. As an aspiring mycologist, she has learned the language of food that grows in dark and secret places--wild onion, morels, hen-of-the-woods, and oyster mushrooms. She is gone now--off to begin another kind of trek; that of higher learning.

We have finished our international book tour and Geraldine Mills has returned to Ireland. Last night I had my last coffeehouse with my writing students at the job I will leave at the end of this year. Endings also bring new possibilities. If I can learn to honor the seasons of things, I will become alert to the quiet places where the best words hide. I can move through the imagination like a native.

Connections

The culmination of two years of work, our collection of poetry, launched in Ireland this week. In this land of mist and rain, clouds broke and an unblemished blue sky has dominated the landscape all week. Each time I visit Ireland, I feel closer to the landscape and the people. To drive for hours down roads with few cars, patchy gold and green mountains, a stone walls rimming fields, a clear ocean and tiny inlets are the scenes I never tire of seeing.

We stopped at Kylemore Abbey for lunch, drove through Letterfrack where there is a cemetery for the boys of a now defunct school for the wayward, unwanted, or orphaned. In the 1960s the school was finally closed but many forgotten boys died young of abuse or disease. To walk by tiny heartshaped gravestones, identifying them only by name and age, is to feel the weight of all tragedies that overshadow our respective histories.

When we arrived in Westport, a vibrant coastal town, the sun was lower in the sky and the sharp, cool air of early evening was beginning to descend. We read in a small cafe called The Creel to a modest but engaged group. The intimacy of the setting and the discussion that ensued made this one of my favorite readings of the trip.

Earlier in the week, I met a woman who edits a collection of poetry from children all over the world--called Eurochild. I also met a filmmaker/poetry series host, two literary press publishers, numerous poetry readers, two young students of poetry, and friends old and new.

There is a reverence for poetry and language here that I often find lacking in the United States. I try to bring the dazzle and awe to my classes, competing with text messages, Facebook, sporting events, and everything else that pulls us away from the wisdom and resonance of words. I am renewed from encounters here, resolve to try anew to ignite interest and enthusiasm in my classes. When I return, I will be off on a reading tour that will continue to bring the language of poetry to people. How lucky to be able to translate landscape, culture, and emotion into poetry and to have the chance to communicate it to an audience. As exhausting as the week has been, I find myself grateful again and again for the graciousness of my writing collaborator and this rarest of opportunities.

New and Renew

I expect leaky faucets, blustery nights, loss, and disappointment. I also await robins, a rose-breasted titmouse, a family of goldfinches. A woman with teenage daughters died in my community this week--someone I didn't know well. An earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand tumbled buildings, collapsing on students, workers, passersby. My daughter was in the town when it happened but she was unharmed. A close brush with a catastrophic event can be life-altering. I trust that light will return, gaudy and generous. Even now there are signs--tufts of trampled grass and patches of mineral-rich soil. In teaching, I find the writing that moves me. In writing, I renew my voice. A residency I applied for prefers emerging writers and my writer and collaborator Geraldine said, aren't all writers emerging? If we have crossed over from emerging to established, do we become complacent? Looking at the world--ugliness and badly behaviored politicians and drivers, then sudden loveliness--a child chasing a leaf, the smell of new earth after a rain--language seems unruly--something I must learn anew. I hope to emerge again and again, awash in language and sense.

What I can Learn from Winter

Icicles hang down from my second story window, a kind of ice-gate that catches the light on rare sunny days. The season is relentless but at the same time, there is a forced quiet that I love. Cancellations have given me time I didn't expect and I use it to write, think, plan classes and lessons, and do the business of being a writer--submitting work to journals and presses. I've been home more this winter than I can remember in many years. Usually I'm up early, out early--at the gym, walking, going to work. The weather has driven me back inside and I watch the glittering trees, venturing out to clear off cars only when it is possible.

What can I learn from this? I tell my students about the importance of observation but often forget that in order to observe, one must slow down. The luxury of making soup on a Wednesday, reading a good book, or just listening to the whoosh and ping of sleet falling on the snow-laden deck and cars. Good writing comes from time spent in a chair (said someone I can't remember) but I would add that it can be time spent looking out of a window or just thinking. When was the last time you were idle? There is almost a code against idleness in our culture. It is trouble to be idle--lazy and unproductive. I'll bet that all great work came out of a period of contemplation. Einstein probably wasn't rushing somewhere when he came up with the theory of relativity. Experimenting and playing leads to creative ideas. What is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life? says the poet Mary Oliver. Should we be driving, standing in line, shuffling through mountains of paperwork? Can we create time in our lives to dream? What change happens in our world happens because of dreamers. We can all benefit from envisioning a life we want to have. As for me, I'm hoping winter lasts a little longer. I'm in love with these unexpected moments, cat curled on the chair, snow falling, tea in hand and all those ideas; the lure of imagination.

The Other Side of Longing

Contemplation and Completion

On my "to do" list--read new writers, finish my short story, write new poetry, submit to journals and magazines. I took Frank X. Gaspar and Franz Wright with me on my writing weekend. Time away makes me want more time away! Instead I'm creating my lessons for a new class, reading student work, booking readings. Most writers I know are working writers--trying to string together a living while writing and publishing, if they are lucky and persistent. Many of us dream of more time to write but there are real constraints like health insurance and the fact that most writing doesn't pay enough to live on. I'm not sure if having a lot more time would make my writing better. There are many writers who have day jobs. Surely there is intellectual stimulation in the act of teaching--sometimes too much. Reading books to consider for my classes is exciting. I want my students to love this stuff as much as I do but truthfully only a handful will each semester. For the rest, I hope they come out thinking that literature is a catalyst for change. A story can instruct, reframe, anger, comfort and more. A poem can be meditative, explosive, terrifying, joyful, or sad--as long as it makes the reader feel. I don't want to be the writer sitting in a room with my cup of espresso and Bach on my iPod. I need to interact, grieve, teach, and help. When I slow down, I call up all the images from my cluttered life, trying to make it into art.

Changing Scenery

I returned home from St. John, a U.S. Virgin Island on January 2. Today I awakened to a snowy vista--beautiful clear sky and rim of snow on my mailbox and outside stair rails. I was swimming in the warm water of the Caribbean a week ago--sea turtles moving slowly and abundant fish leaping out of the water. I am grateful for the amazing places that I have visited and now hold inside of me.
I am re-reading Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hawakawa and Alan Hawakawa. It is a book I'm using in my class in the spring semester. I loved this book when I was twenty-something and returning to college. I hadn't looked at it in many years, ordered the latest edition, and retreated to couch with a cup of tea and my daughter's overly affectionate cat. The idea of language as a living, breathing thing used in social interaction, historical context or embedded with prejudices, cultural bias, abstractions, and a kind of magic (as if we sometimes believe the word to be the actual thing--like the word rattlesnake evoking fear though it is not the actual rattlesnake) is endlessly fascinating to me. I hope it will be so for my students. It was a struggle choosing books for this new class I'm teaching on critical and creative thinking. Suggested books had conundrums, math games, right and left brain activities. While I will incorporate some of this (and also some amazing videos that are out there--Silent Beats is one I am thinking of--about our assumptions), I am a language person. It became increasingly evident to me that I needed to find a book that showed the ways in which language impacts who we are and how we live---in advertising they already know this. I remember my father (who made a living in advertising) coming up with slogans or illustrations that showed people looking attractive while they were interacting with a product, implying that the product will do more than its intended use--it may win you the man or woman of your dreams, make you thinner, more successful, prettier or more handsome. It was fun to find that a book that really challenged how I thought in my twenties still has something to offer me now. The newer edition has been updated to include computers and more recent historical events that have changed how we use language. Language is always changing. One of the interesting activities I did in Ireland with Geraldine was to trade sayings/superstitions/cliches. While many are the same, some are different or phrased differently, depending on the culture and context. Language defines a culture but it can also be used to hurt, judge, infer, or slant. I used to do an activity where students shared words they liked and words they didn't like. My daughter hates the word burger. I love the word juxtapose. We dislike a name because we once knew someone with that name that aroused something negative in us. All of this is fascinating to me. I hope I can make this material come alive for my students.