Writing class at the home school

Maybe it is too much Pablo Neruda, too much wondering how the writer slips out of his own skin and becomes the water, the leaf mold, a Chilean winter.  Maybe it is too many years of interviews, press releases, weddings with peau de soie and stephanotis.  Too much telling, too little being.

Reporting trains us in useful skills:  paying attention, taking really fast, legible notes, writing under pressure and in chaos, presenting information.  It does not train merging.  It is not preparation for shape shifting.

What I think I am beginning to understand about poetry is the need to inhabit.  The Method Acting of writing.  In it, one has a single task, to be.  To be the loneliness, the anticipation, the fire, the furniture.

This truth has been stalking me.  It jostles me roughly on crowded rail platforms, cuts me off in traffic shouting expletives.  I believe it is how one lifts out of dead places with hollow sounds and ascends to music.  Now all that remains is the doing of it.

Making friends

Sundance: I wasn’t cheating.

Macon: You can die. For that matter, you both can die.

Sundance: If he invites us to stay, then we’ll go.

Butch: We gotta leave anyway.

Sundance: He’s got to invite us to stick around.

Butch: I’m over the hill, but it can happen to you.

Sundance: That’s just what I want to hear.

Butch: Every day you get older, now that’s a law.

Butch approaches Macon.

Butch: What would you think about maybe asking us to stick around?

Macon: What?

Butch: You don’t have to mean it or anything, just ask us to stick around, I promise you–

Macon shoves Butch aside. Butch turns to Sundance.

Butch: I can’t help you, Sundance.

Macon freezes. Sundance stands up.

Macon: I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. If I draw on you, you’ll kill me.

Sundance: There’s that possibility.

Butch: No, you’d be killing yourself. Why don’t you just invite us to stick around? You can do it. And easy. C’mon.

Macon: Why dontcha stick around?

Butch: Thanks, but we gotta get going.

– Sundance (Robert Redford), Butch (Paul Newman), Macon (Donnelly Rhodes), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), written by William Goldman

(with thanks to Scott Myers)

Recently and repeatedly I've encountered messages advising me to be on more agreeable terms with what vexes (torments) me.  In my daily emailed Note from the Universe, the question was, "Want to move a mountain?  Befriend it."  Yesterday the suggestion was longer.  

"If you can fall in love with just one thing about him, her, them, it, or you, Marylinn, just once a day, and speak it aloud, you'll be surprised at how quickly this will transform your entire life.

I love that look on your face when the coin drops -
    The Universe"

****(Okay, I have to report that I cannot get the fonts to change and match nor can I have this text in a stand-out color and no amount of love is going to make me happy about it, but there it is.)****

Over the past three days, I have tuned in to podcasts that share the application of such principles.  It reminded me of the scene from Butch Cassidy and how, maybe, we can make something leave by asking it to stick around.

To speak love, acceptance and welcome over aches, pains, tremors, unsure footing, life-long depression, fear, anxiety and every other presumed defect of body or character is unknown country.  I am not familiar with the customs here.  What I assume, though, is trying something so radically different cannot possibly make any of it worse.  To feel that I am no longer swimming against my own tide or that of the wider world would be so peaceful.  My arms are tired.  I find - I have found - it difficult to believe that our brief time here does not include larger portions of contentment, quiet mind, joy.  Having seen myself - and I know I am not alone in this, many of us have this in common - as a nearly-impossible fixer-upper into whom most of my energy needs to be poured to keep the roof from caving in or a portal to hell opening in the living room floor, has half-consumed and wearied me for years.  More than two decades.

The series of programs this week, about which I received notices that I chose to ignore, featured Panache Desai whose own descriptions of his history and work tell the story better than I can.   That the series was free made me less wary and that it was suggested by a friend whom I know to be much more fluent in this sort of transformation, who knows, too, what I seek, told me just to go ahead.

I am not sharing this because I have experienced the shift from an old, estranged self to the whole, radiant, authentic being the teachings assure is possible.  Instead I am sharing this part of the process, perhaps a new willingness simply to allow all that is me without my own ever-present stink eye given when I fall short of some artificial ideal.  I cannot even pretend that I know how to fall in love with my arthritis, with my fatigue, my too-often indifferent ways.  So I am going to walk around the table and come at all of this from a different direction.  "I'd really like you to stay around," I say, making new friends from old afflictions.  In unison, they answer, "Thanks, but we gotta get going."  I hope with hot and spangled passion there will be more to report. xo

Ooh La La

Do we feel like dancing yet?

Go. Go now and make something.

Vintage collage from the Rubbermoon archives

On their Facebook page, Rubbermoon owner Debra Valoff has shared the collage, inviting friends/fans/everyone to print it and MAKE SOMETHING. Be sure you return there and post your creation.

#

What messages do I take from seeing this piece again?  I assume it did not pop up yesterday devoid of meaning.  It reminds me that order may be over-rated, that color is king (or queen), more may be just the right amount, the hand often knows more than the mind, matching anything is not required and no piece of good can ever be considered too small to be of value.

 AND, because I am having great fun today with red letters, this is my 400th published blog post.  Who knew?  Thank you all for being here.  xo

Seeking a lighter touch

The TARDIS, Rose and The Doctor

In an attempt to feel less earth-bound, to rediscover - or just discover - a lighter touch in writing, to find themes more air-filled, as opposed to leaden, "imaginary maps" arrived as a topic.  Down Google's sometimes Byzantine paths I arrived here, which led me here and here to views of the sky through the ages.

But other planetary - earth-bound - curiosities lurked on this page.

Ice: A Victorian Romance

This exhibition explores the Victorian fascination with polar and glacial ice in the period from 1818 to 1860. In 1818, the British Navy began to send out expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, broadening the search around 1840 to include Antarctica. Also around 1840, the glacial theory was proposed and debated, and the ice at the poles became the key to envisioning the ice ages of the past.

And also,

Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition to Egypt

The French expeditionary force that occupied Egypt under Napoleon's command from July 1798 until 1801 included some of France's leading scientists. Their work was published as the Description de l'Égypte, which is featured in this exhibition, along with other rare books that document the story of the French scientific expedition to Egypt.

Right now, feeling the effects of gravity seems less a failure of the poetic, the imaginative, and more a simple part of being an inhabitant of this planet.   Today I lack the wits and the energy to explore the romance of ice or Napoleon as scientist, but wanted to remind us all that voyages through space and time, as Dr. Who will attest, never quite take you where you think they will.

Poetry and dream

Water Dreaming 072 by Walangari Kamtawarra, on-line gallery here

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."
Audre Lorde

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When one is not a poet, the only choice left is to get as close as possible. The apprenticeship is forever and worth each agonizing, deleted, reconsidered word that moves one forward.

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We hope for easier

I think I disabled Word Verification - putting an end to one thing (or as I first typed it, thang) that makes you worry about visual degeneration.  I hope commenting becomes easier.