Words, time and words, revisited

With art added to the original post, one from the vault. xo

 

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Words, time and words

Paintings by Kristin Vestguard.

There is a shipwreck aspect to writing. Surrendering to the call means other pieces of life are abandoned. The tighter its grip, the farther I drift from ordinary. I hadn't thought of writing and me in these terms until today, until a ship I hadn't known I was waiting for sailed into view.

I am so thankful for the writers I have met recently through our blogs, yet it is still a solitary, lonely business. At times the connections make it feel more remote for I see where others have found the thread they need and I, in my own eyes, am stumbling around, getting my foot caught in a bucket, stepping on a rake, having misplaced the last known pencil. I find it impossible to explain the writing desire - or is it a compulsion? It is not like anything else that I can name...a day's work can produce pages of words, but if they are not the right words...

So much about life I find to be acts of faith and writing is surely one of them. So is getting out of bed in the morning. A writer has a place she wants the writing to take her - and those who read the words - but, at least as I practice it, the act is much closer to interpretive dance, I don't know which way I will bend until I do it, than to, say, something for which I have created an outline and have a...plan. I haven't done an outline for anything since junior college and what I remember is writing the outline after the paper. You can guess what that did to my grade.

The left side of my brain gets a lot rest. It is never invited over to play when I write; the times when it has popped in to see what we were up to, its suggestions made me feel like I was trying to swim while zipped into a sleeping bag. While taking part in a fiction writing workshop, someone asked (not the classic "where do you get your ideas?"), "How do you know what happens next?" The only, the honest answer was, "When the car pulls up, I wait to see who gets out and then tell about it."

My rescue vessel arrived in the form of a writer friend who has taken some time away from writing to do the work for which we rely on that other side of the brain. Life, rude and intrusive or the opposite, sometimes needs us to talk to attorneys, reduce soaring piles of magazines and mail, make arrangements, show up. But in talking to her, feeling our mutual urgency about whatever it is that we're doing - for neither of us is sure, we just know we have to do it - I wept for knowing that this is not madness and that fact could be confirmed.

Drama in my everyday world is, in my opinion, something loathsome and to be avoided. When I use a word like madness my self-regulator tries to give me the stink eye. I look away, knowing this isn't the exaggeration it might seem. Pushing forward with a body of work that is not a novel, not a collection of poems or short stories, more a gathering of thoughts from heart, mind and spirit, is not a wholly rational act and, because of its solitary nature, becomes a questionable investment of all the resources, down to those dollar coins the post office machines give as change.

It may be a measure of commitment, the single mindedness that makes it possible to float so far from known landmarks without having a clue that I am no longer tethered. The work may be epic, the work may be one paragraph that builds upon another, or one word, followed by three more, but the force it exerts once the call is answered could pull a bulldozer out of quicksand.

One of my core beliefs is that each of us is called to something and as long as it does no harm, the possibilities are infinite. I wobbled and waffled for years, trying to understand the call, trying to meet its expectations, halfway trying to dodge it and substitute an activity like writing. It now has me for however long it takes or however long I last. There are far more meanings to the word surrender than waving the white flag.

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Word of the Week - 84

Vintage tools, artfully displayed.

A home fabric stash.

Word of the Week:  GOODS

Goods and Services, Dry Goods, Fred C. Dobbs in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" referring to his rather meager possessions as his goods.  Our stuff.  Tools of our trade, our passion, our obsession.  I am not, or not yet, one of the virtuous de-clutterers.  I militantly defend my right to as many books, pens, blank envelopes and paper goods as I can afford (important) and accommodate.  Need I even mention just how many things one can do with a piece of paper?

By my definition, goods differ from collections in their usefulness.  We may never engage on a day-to-day basis with what we collect - or we may - but goods have a purpose.  That purpose is to be used, even used up, though that is difficult when something is no longer made, can no longer be found.  Discontinuances catch us by surprise.  Such wailing, my own voice in my ears, when, without warning, Dennison stopped manufacturing those little slide-out cardboard boxes of red-bordered mailing labels or lick-and-stick gold notarial seals, for example.  It seemed Trader Joe's Chili/Mango popsicles existed for two shopping trips before vanishing like the woolly mammoth.  Fabric designs, scrapbook papers and sets of clear/cling rubber stamps have life spans like a mayfly.  Blink and you've missed them.  Try and track them down.  Just try.

Paper, envelope display at Paper Source.

Spices or goods by any other name.

I often think of those brave, sturdy and determined types who settled the American West.  I picture the trail, wagon following wagon in good weather and misery.  I see the goods that were too bulky, too heavy and of too limited a purpose being left behind.  A harpsichord is generally what I imagine.  Treasured, valuable, almost impossible to replace in the new life, but it will not feed them or keep them warm, no matter how it nourishes their souls.  I would have made a very poor pioneer.

Let's line up and kick fear's ass

Fear, I'd know you anywhere.

Boiled down, fear is really an absence of good answers. The answers we'd prefer, notarized, carved in stone, sworn to in court.  Fear is not knowing.  Which, left unchecked, means fear could rule the world.  Oh, wait.  It sort of does.

I do not want it making my choices, sending me into tailspins of trying to line up all the elements just right, pegging down every corner of the picnic cloth, wearing a belt and suspenders, whimpering for a sign that all will be well.  I received that sign, or message, long ago.  It continues to fit every circumstance.  Trust, it says.  You're still here.

Word of the Week - 83

A trek in Tibet.

Word(s) of the Week:  THE HIGH ROAD

Among the things I have come to know or believe, one is that the high road is never a wrong choice.  Any harsh words I can manage not to speak, any uncharitable thought I can dilute, any action I can take that leans more toward kindness gives me hope for myself and for all of us.  The high road comes with strong visual support.  I can see the forked path, one descending into shadow, miasma and murk, the other rising to fresh air (albeit possibly thin air) and sunshine.  If we are gullible in our kindness, what is the harm?  I know I will survive being a fool.  It is not my job to figure out the motives of others as an excuse to behave ungenerously.  Add this to the list of daily practices that I endeavor to include.  Luckily, what we seek is progress, not perfection.

Word of the Week - 82

Word of the Week:  LISTEN

If you have become estranged from your intuition, all is not lost.  The first step is to grow and remain quiet, still.  The second is to listen.  The third is to trust the information you receive no matter how unlikely, or even unreliable it seems.  Knowledge greater than ours takes us in directions we would never have chosen.

The prompts are likely subtle.  In my experience, intuition doesn't shriek.  Notions of what to do next may arrive sounding similar to an overheard conversation, or may be the result of simply knowing something unknown a second before.  Among my examples is the suggestion, several years ago as I began my morning at the computer, to "find more writers."  Just that, not how, not where, not why.  So I did.  From that directive, I discovered poets, their blogs, their work, and ways my own writer's voice could become stronger, winnowing down the choice of words I needed for what I had to say.   Those found writers became friends, models, teachers, even an angel who walked me through the poetry she'd studied her whole life.  In one morning, based upon a flash of what I can only call intuition, my world expanded like a new universe being born.

Intuition, I believe, is the Panama Canal, moving us from one level of existence to another.  We are lifted and transferred from ordinary to expanded.  Intuition is not epiphany, not the explosive realization of discovery but something much softer, yet quietly insistent.  It may lead us to epiphanies. to shouts of "eureka" and such.  For me, its gifts, for they certainly are that, are neither noisy nor big, at least in the moment.  In the aftermath of taking the recommended action, I may be aware that it was, in fact, a big deal.  At which point, my normal response is to sit, subdued and at the same time dazed, grateful almost beyond measure.  A sacred gift, indeed.  Thank you.

 

The Green People

What follows is a story first printed in Teesha Moore's The Studio 'zine quite a few years ago, later reprinted at my website.  I don't think I've shared it here before.  Please excuse the spacing, it is too late in the day/century to try and fix it.

My family had two sides, the indoor and the outdoor. When I went on vacation with the indoor grandparents, we visited people. With my own parents and the outdoor faction, we visited trees. The trees we went to see more than any others were the giant redwoods of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, both within picnic distance of the San Joaquin Valley farm where my father grew up. Their family recreation had always been going to the mountains; simple drives, picnics, hiking, camping. The Sierras were their back yard. When my father had a family of his own, we followed the same path. Up we'd drive, watching the altitude signs along a winding road that passed rocky vistas and high mountain meadows. Eventually we would reach the trees, always finding a spot beneath their ceiling to have our lunch. We sat in dappled sunlight, filtered spots bright as coins dotting our clothes and bodies. The sound at ground level was the noise of skittering creatures. Higher up, soaring branches tall enough to touch the wind played the forest's unique music, a source of deep peace. Over the years our vacations and my father's writing assignments took us all around California. Trees awaited us at every destination. We came to know the oaks of the Mother Lode, the Monterey cypress, windbreaks of eucalyptus on the coastal plain. We were introduced to the bristle cone pine in our local mountains, date palms and Joshua "trees" in the desert, orchards, timber stands and cottonwoods turning with the season. Sometimes my father would despair of his children as we read comic books in the station wagon's back seat instead of looking out the windows. What he didn't know was that all the information, all the sights and stories and impressions reached us anyway. We learned the names of the towns and the rivers and felt ourselves among friends in the woods. We were still quite young when my father tried to tell us, partly in words, what trees meant to him. It was a December evening, we'd taken our Christmas tree from the car and it waited on the lawn as my mother readied its spot in the front window. My father called us to form a circle around the fir as light from the open front door spilled over us. We joined hands and danced, actually skipped, around the tree, he singing some version of a Christmas song. It was unlike anything we'd ever seen him do and we laughed from the surprise and the joy of it. "I've always thought I was a druid," he said, explaining, simplifying.   "They were people whose religion was about nature. " Then the dance began again and we declared we were all druids, sisters and brothers of the forest, children of the trees.

Little stuffed things

The Babysitter and Melba, art by my sister Laurie.

Animal brooches by Kamio Mari.

Sewn art by Julie Arkell, possibly brooches.

Art by Jone Hallmark.

Stuffed dolls in matchbox houses by Paula Mills.

Hand painted, embroidered folk dolls by Jess Quinn.

Summer becomes fall on September 23.  In places that aren't Southern California that could mean quiet lap crafts as the day's light decreases.  Hand sewing with bits of scrap is a worthy endeavor with Christmas barely three months away.

Fabric craft on a small scale is appealing work for any season, any locale.  I could embroider on a sunny deck overlooking the Pacific, couldn't you?  Pocket-sized art can travel anywhere (I'm not sure how they feel about needles and scissors on airplanes, it has been so long since I've flown).  There is almost no fabric scrap too tiny to save.

Likenesses of creatures from nature, gumball-headed, pocket-sized stocking-face dolls, wee imaginative brooches, sampler-like geometric shapes, cuddleable companions, close work with good lighting (a must!) may be how we are called pass an evening as the seasons turn.

I would be giddily happy to spend an entire day googling and researching the textile crafts of artists around the world.  What a wealth of inspiration, but then so is the sewing basket, the scrap bag.  Maybe that flowered shirt can find a new life here.  It IS faded in spots, frayed along the placket, would I buy it at a thrift shop?  Of course I would, to turn into little stuffed things.