Telling Herstories: The Broad View

Reading Out Loud

My ears ache from wearing head phones and I'm getting tired of listening to my own voice. What am I doing? I'm narrating my memoir, Walking Nature Home, for the audio version to be released late this year. So far, I've read three chapters. Each one takes about a day, even though the finished length of each chapter is only somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes. With nine chapters total, I figure I need six more good reading days to finish.

What takes so long? Getting it right. The actual read of a chapter takes somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours. When I stumble over a word, or get the tone or emphasis wrong, or make another error--or a loud motorcycle goes by outside--I start the sentence over again. Sometimes I go back to the beginning of a paragraph if that makes a "cleaner" break to make sure I haven't changed the tone or volume of my voice.

I could record at a real studio, but I'd rather spend those hours in the comfort of my own office, sitting at a microphone table designed and made out of scraps by my sculptor husband, Richard. My office isn't soundproof, but by using a homemade foam baffle (thank you for that too, Richard!) and a directional mike (a Blue Yeti USB mike that plugs right into my Mac laptop, for those who want to know the technical stuff), it does pretty well, except for the occasional passing ya-hoo with a loud vehicle. That round black screen in front of the mike in the photo above, by the way, is to soften the explosion of sound that comes with 'P's and other hard consonants. It looks weird, but is very effective.

The rough edit takes about twice times as long as the read time, which means three to four hours of careful listening, deleting each bad or duplicate part of the soundtrack and pasting the two cut edges together, just the way we used to do with real tape and a razor blade back in the days before recordings went digital, listening carefully to the mend, and then moving on... I do the rough edit myself using Garageband, Apple's nifty--and surprisingly powerful--audio editing program that came free with my Macintosh. It works just like the sound boards I've used in real studios. (That's Garageband above, with me reading the opening of Chapter Three on the sound track.)

What does this have to do with writing? These hours at the mike and listening with the headphones remind me of why reading your work aloud is one of the best editing techniques around. I'm hearing Walking Nature Home anew: the tone of the words, the cadence and rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs, the flow of the story itself. And even after editing it dozens and dozens of times, even after the editors at University of Texas Press went over it with their careful eyes, even though it's in print, I hear things I could do to improve the writing.

That's the magic of hearing your work, of reading it out loud and listening crically. Looking at your writing on paper or on screen is useful; hearing it is entirely different. It sounds new, and thus you notice things you otherwise wouldn't.

You don't need my quick-and-dirty home recording studio to do it. All you need is a quiet space--a room with a door that shuts, or a time when no one else is around to interrupt you. Pick up your writing, put on your best storytelling or reading voice, clear your throat, sit up straight, and read. Don't rush it and don't dramatize, just read your words with the respect they deserve. And listen. When you notice something that doesn't sound right, stop and make a note. Then pick up your writing and start reading again. You'll be surprised at what you hear.

P.S. What is surprising me as I record Walking Nature Home? It's pretty darn good!

"Luck" Takes Hard Work

"You are so lucky," wrote a reader in response to one of my recent columns. "Most people don't live life in the full way you do."

My initial response was cranky. 

It's hard to see the "lucky" in Richard's brain cancer, and in his second brain surgery in the past eleven months. It's very hard to see the lucky in the pathology report on the latest tumors: Grade 4, as bad as brain cancer gets, with a prognosis I have no wish to invoke here, or anywhere else.

It's hard to see the lucky in my mom's recent diagnosis with Alzheimer's Disease, leaving my 82-year-old dad to manage her care with me "assisting" from three hours drive away.

It's hard to see the lucky in my daily struggle to carve out "me time" in order to write, the one thing that saves such sanity as I retain, and restores my spirit.

After getting over my crankiness though, I think I understand: I'm fortunate to have potentially rich opportunities, to be able to make the kinds of choices I make, and to be living a full, present, relatively gracious life with all the above. 

That's "luck," I suppose, the kind that takes some mighty hard work to recognize. (And it reminds me all too much of the proverbial Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.)

We don't get to pick what life brings us. What power we have over events and circumstance lies in how we respond.

We can choose to learn from what life sends our way--I'm certainly learning much about life and how to live it gracefully and generously from this journey with Richard's brain cancer, plus my mom's Alzheimers. As a writer of personal essay and memoir, I am also accumulating stories to use to illustrate that hard-won wisdom. Does that make me "lucky?" I suppose you could say so, even while admitting that it's tough luck indeed.

Choosing to respond openly and graciously to life's challenges pays off. For instance, on the days when I'm able to avoid sinking into the muck of overwhelm, I am able to notice the riches of my moments--the warmth of sunrises and sunsets, the gift of love, the sound of sandhill cranes' haunting calls as they wing high overhead, the sight of fringed gentians blooming in vivid blue or aspen leaves flaming gold, the feel of frosty air at dawn.

Those riches surround me every day. Whether I see or feel them is my choice.

Not that the choosing is either simple or easy--it's not. But those choices determine whether I find mind- and spirit-nurturing beauty and happiness in even the most difficult of days, or not.

Luck's hard work, not happenstance. It's the attitude to you bring to life, the spirit you cultivate, the way you are in even the most unassuming of moments.

That abililty to find the flashes of luck in any situation is something that can enrich your writing as well. Think about it next time you're struggling with your work and ask yourself: What choices am I making? How do they affect the stories I tell? Can I choose to frame my writing differently? How would it change if I did?

"We become the stories we tell ourselves," says psychologist and author Mary Pipher. What stories are you telling?

 

Showing Persistence

Some ten years ago, not long after my husband Richard and I took up restoring the block of degraded urban creek that parallels one edge of the reclaimed former industrial property where we live, we rescued a clump of Rocky Mountain iris that had been uprooted by a grader-blade on a remote county road. A native westerner, this wild iris flourishes in unplowed, spring-wet grasslands, its blossoms tinting whole meadows blue-violet.

We carefully wrapped the plants in damp sheets of newspaper, brought them home, and dug them in just above the creek. The next spring we searched for their pale green leaves among the crowded blades of sedge and grass with no success. We were disappointed, but we had weeds to pull and other transplants to tend. As our stream-side restoration project began to flourish, we forgot the wild iris.

Some years later, that iris appeared right where we'd planted it, its slender, stiffly flattened green leaves contrasting with the winter-dry grass. Over the next month, half a dozen slender, pointed buds rose and burst into bloom, the pale blue flowers floating like so many butterflies.

Then came a drought the likes of which hadn't occurred here in several centuries. Our spring-fed creek dried up for weeks, and the iris disappeared. The creek's flow eventually returned, but the ethereal blossoms didn't--not the next spring, or the next. We figured the wild iris was gone. Until its pale blue flowers reappeared six springs later.

Earlier this year, Richard said, "I wonder if the iris will bloom this year." We searched for its stiff leaves and didn't find them. Then, a few weeks later, he was picking up windblown trash along the creek and spotted the first two blossoms. "The iris are back!" he called, and I scrambled down the bank to admire them.

That these tough native plants with their delicate flowers persist at all along our thread of urban creek, bounded by a parking lot on one bank and a former industrial property on the other seems to me a small miracle. I'm grateful for the gift of their lives, and the lesson they demonstrate in persistence.

*****

Here's your writing prompt: In this short piece, I used the life of a wild iris plant to represent persistence. Does something or someone in your life symbolize persistence for you? How would you tell the story to demonstrate--show, not tell--that particular quality? Try writing your story of persistence without ever using the word. (Note that in this piece I didn't actually use the word until the very last sentence.) Go for it!

Taking the Round-About Route to the Proper Destination

A few weeks back, my snail-mail box yielded a treat, a review copy of Susan Leigh Tomlinson's new book, How to Keep A Naturalist's Notebook. I dipped into the book immediately, and here's part of what I said in my review for Story Circle Book Reviews:

This thoughtful and elegantly written guide shows you to how to dip beneath the surface of the natural world through keeping an illustrated field journal. We journal about our lives, why not journal about the other species around us as well? Observing and noting nature is a way of getting to know that wider, wilder community, and through it, deepening our understanding of our own species. It's a way of honoring the living world....

I knew after reading the book that I wanted to talk with Tomlinson about her work. So I emailed her, and she agreed to an interview. The full Q & A is on Story Circle Book Reviews, but here's an excerpt that touches on questions near and dear to all who write about our life-choices. 

Tweit: Your writing in How to Keep a Naturalist's Notebook seems like that of someone who grew up in kinship with nature. You have an undergraduate degree in fine art, and two graduate degrees in geology. Why the switch? Or do you see art and science as integrated?

Tomlinson: This is a difficult question to address--not because I think science and art aren't integrated, because, in fact, I do. Rather, it is a more troubling and complicated answer, and says something, I think, about society and our perception of the arts versus science. Also, this is a bit confessional, and so that makes it harder to share....

Early on, my parents recognized something in my drawings and enrolled me in in art classes at the local museum, even though that must have really stretched their very strained budget. I enjoyed it--immensely--but I also enjoyed being outside a lot, too. I would walk around in the surrounding desert, exploring arroyos, picking up interesting rocks... and somewhere out there, I decided I was going to be a scientist. Art was just something I did because it was fun and it came naturally to me, but it wasn't something I ever took seriously as a career.

I had this idea, see, that scientists were more respected for their brains than artists--they were taken more "seriously"--and that was important to me. I've always struggled in school, mostly because I am an inveterate daydreamer, even today. A teacher would be explaining how to do this or that with math and my mind would start to wander...and the next thing I'd know, we'd be having a quiz about it. So while my siblings were always excelling at school, I was dragging home the dicey report card. I got it in my head that I wasn't very smart.

Around the same time, there was a wonderful television program on in New Mexico, and it focused on science for kids. ... It was, I guess, a local version of "Mr. Wizard," and we used to watch it school. I truly loved that show. And perhaps because of it, science was one of the subjects at which I did well in school.

But math was not. And so when it came time to go to college, my father sat me down and told me I should major in art, because a scientist needed to be able to do math. Though he probably didn't mean it this way, the implication, in my mind, was that I wasn't smart enough to be a scientist. So I majored in art, and always felt a little less smart because of it.

I enjoyed majoring in art, more or less. But what I didn't know then and understand now is that I didn't really want to be a "fine artist." I wanted to be an illustrator. One is not better than the other, but certainly there is more prestige in society in being someone who is creating original and ground-breaking art.... The trouble is, I'm really a pretty simple person, and don't care a whole lot about being a ground-breaking artist. ... In art school though, the emphasis was on fine art (and at the time, this seemed to mean, "the uglier, the better" though I am certain, in retrospect, that I interpreted that incorrectly), so that's what I thought I had to do.

Oftentimes, I've envisioned the path my life has taken as someone who is standing in a station when a train rolls in, and I hop on it because I think it's going to take me where I want to go. Only later do I find that it is the wrong train, and I have to wait until the next stop in order to get off and right my course...

So after I graduated, I kicked around, trying very half-heartedly to be ground-breaking, but it just wasn't in me... . After awhile I got a job working for a geologist, who made a point of teaching me some things about geology. I enjoyed it a lot, and then one day, I said to myself, "You know, I've always wanted to be a scientist..."

My feelings about scientists being "brainier" than artists persisted all the way through graduate school, all the way through getting a doctorate in geology. But while I loved being outside and doing field work, learning the geology of a place, ... at some point I realized that, once again, I'd apparently gotten on the wrong train, for the wrong reasons.

After I'd earned my doctorate, I stumbled into a job in the Honors College at our university. Through a series of very fortunate circumstances, I wound up directing and teaching in a new degree program that combined humanities and the study of nature and the environment (the Natural History and Humanities degree). I was hired, of all things, because I had a scholastic background in both! And suddenly, it all came together, and I knew I was home. It turned out that all those years, I hadn't been on the wrong trains at all--I'd just needed to take several connecting trains to reach my destination.

And most importantly, I'd finally matured enough to realize that I was neither "brainier" as a scientist or as an artist, one discipline did not have more prestige than another, fine arts were not somehow "better" than illustration. I finally realized that what is important is to always keep seeking the things that interest you, the things you love--this is what is important when trying to chart a course for your life. If you do this, you will one day arrive at your proper destination.

I still reek at math.

______

Here's your life-writing prompt: Imagine the course of your life as a series of metaphorical train journeys. Where did you begin? What trains did you take? And where did they take you? Can you say, like Susan Tomlinson, that in the end, by "seeking the things that interest you, the things you love" you have arrived at "your proper destination"?

Facing Fear

On our way to the Stories From the Heart Conference in Austin, Texas, in February, Richard and I drove nearly 1,500 miles through snowstorms, hail, sleet, and pounding rain, from our home in the southern Rocky Mountains across the Great Plains to the Arkansas Ozarks and then south to Austin, the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Along the way we talked from time to time about the larger and longer journey with Richard's brain cancer we've been navigating. Both journeys had their scary times, but neither is responsible for the clutch of fear that inspired the title of this post.

That fear came up--seemingly out of nowhere--as I was working through my own writing exercise with the participants in my "Writing the Hard Stuff" workshop at Stories from the Heart. In the exercise, I asked the group to look into the metaphorical suitcase that contains the also-metaphorical baggage we each carry around and identify the heaviest item in there. As they thought and wrote, I opened my laptop and looked into my own suitcase (for the record, it's a huge soft-sided case of the sort popular in the 1970s, in black watch plaid accessorized with tasteful green textured vinyl). It wasn't hard to distinguish the heaviest thing in my suitcase: fear. There's a lot of scary stuff in my life right now: Richard's brain cancer, our finances, my work, the economy, global warming, and so on. As I described the fear though, I was shocked. It was an entirely different sort of fear, and one I never thought I'd be troubled by, fear of success.
 

I cogitated about that fear during the remainder of the conference, and all along the thousand-plus mile drive home, including one marathon 700-mile day where we pressed on long after we were worn out in order to out-flanked a huge snowstorm blowing past us. As we navigated the storm's aftermath on the last day of the drive (that's a snowy New Mexico landscape above--those cholla cactus look pretty cold in their white blankets!), I tried to explain the fear that I saw to Richard. "I'm afraid of succeeding," I said.

He looked at me, puzzled. He's watched me work hard over several decades to establish a career as a freelance writer. "I know, it sounds weird," I continued, trying to articulate what I felt inside.

What it boils down to is this: I'm a successful writer, I'm widely and well published, including twelve books and hundreds of articles and essays in magazines and newspapers running the gamut from Audubon and Popular Mechanics, to the Los Angeles Times and High Country News. But I struggle to earn a comfortable living from my work. What's in my way? It seems that I sabotage myself with a deep-seated fear that greater success will force me to "grow up" and be someone I'm not, someone who is too busy to cultivate a kitchen garden and make her own yogurt, someone who doesn't have time to talk to the magpies in the yard or greet the sunrise and sunset, someone who has to have her makeup done and teeth whitened, someone who won't enjoy just sitting side by side with the man she loves and watching miles of snowy landscape pass by. Does that sound silly?

Perhaps. But that's the fear I recognized while participating in my own workshop. I'm afraid to write what's in my heart, afraid that voicing it will shift my life in such profound ways that I won't have have time and space to be ordinary, every day, plain-old me, the me who loves life and all the lives we share it with.

Now I've got to face that fear. For me, that means writing it out.

What fears lurk in the suitcase--or knapsack, purse, or briefcase--that holds your baggage. If you take them out and look at them in the light, what do they have to say to you? What would you say to them?

Write it all out. Like me, you may find your load--and your life--lighter afterward.

Difficult Memories: Finding Voice and Grace in the "Hard Stuff"

How do we handle the hard stuff in our life stories? How do we write about the memories that are controversial, painful, or just no fun to remember? We'll practice writing techniques that strengthen our voices and reveal the grace and wisdom to be found even in hard times.

That's the description of "Difficult Memories," the workshop I'll be teaching at Story Circle Network's Stories From the Heart V Conference, in Austin, Texas, February 5 - 7, 2010. 

When I proposed the workshop last spring, I was thinking about my process in writing my memoir, Walking Nature Home, and my struggle to find the wisdom in the painful and outright hard parts of my own story. When I wrote the first few drafts of that book, I was still angry and hurt by some of my experiences. Writing out my feelings was therapeutic, but didn't result in particularly good memoir.

In fact, some of the initial drafts are so bad that re-reading them is more than embarrassing. It took me decades--and many rewrites--before I learned to chip away at the narrative to find the gift of gold in the hard stuff, before I found the grace to tell my story in a way that was respectful, honest, and compelling. When I finally did, reading the story was exciting instead of painful. It finally felt right--and I felt good about writing it.

Here's an example of finding voice and grace in the hard stuff, from the first chapter of Walking Nature Home:

That Labor Day weekend, we went backpacking with friends and an early fall snowstorm moved in. All I remember from those three days is a steady rain of wet, white flakes falling silently, muffling forest and lake and rock, pressing down on the roof of our small tent until I felt like I would suffocate. On the long drive out, even the cab of our pickup truck seemed to have shrunk. I looked over at Kent and said,

“I need space. I think we should separate.”

His jaw clenched hard, but he didn’t turn his eyes from the gravel road. “You’ll be dead first.”

I moved out. He attempted suicide. I saw a counselor. 

Those four paragraphs paint a vivid picture of the disintegration of my first marriage, conveying the salient points without portraying every gory detail. The last line shows how dramatic paring events down to their essence can be: "I moved out. He attempted suicide. I saw a counselor."

There's obviously a lot more I could have said. That chapter did in fact originally include much more material, all of it vivid and dramatic in its own right.

Over time as I worked on the memoir though, I realized that this particular part of the story had come to "weigh" so much that it disturbed the overall balance. Writing out the intimate details of the disintegration of my first marriage may have helped me come to peace with my decisions, but it distracted from the larger point, a love story on several levels: me learning to love myself, the loving bond I found with my second husband, Richard, and the love of nature, the community of species with whom we share this planet, that sustained me through those years and still does.

As I re-visited the painful story of my first marriage, my ability to tell the story well grew as I grew as a person. I can't say which came first: my ability to understand myself or my ability to write the hard stuff with clarity and grace. But I know that we grew together, that memoir and me. 

Now I need every bit of that clarity and grace as my beloved Richard and I walk hand in hand through the "hard stuff" of his brain cancer. I know my practice in learning to tell the sometimes painful and traumatic stories that make up Walking Nature Home is helping me keep my balance today, both in writing and life. Wrestling with difficult memories not only taught me how to write a story that novelist Sandra Dallas recently hailed as "a moving story... filled with hope and joy," it also taught me how to make a hopeful, joyous life--no matter what comes.

Telling--and Re-telling--a Thanksgiving Story

One of the most basic issues in writing is how to tell the story: where to start, where to end, what voice or voices to use, what to include, and at least as important, what to leave out. Perhaps it's obvious, but sometimes we forget that any one story can be told in many ways with many different results. Which way you choose depends in part on what your aim is, as well as on the audience you're speaking to. Knowing how to tell a story involves enough introspection to know what the story says,its underlying meaning. (Sometimes we only learn the underlying meaning by writing out the details of the story and then letting it sit a while--I call this letting it compost--and reading it anew to see what it has to say.)
 


Here's an example of telling one story--in this case, a life-story, part of my ongoing project to write memoir about my life as it happens--in two different ways for two different audiences. The first version, "A Tale of Two Hospitals," is on my blog at http://tinyurl.com/ybkbmet. Read that first, and then read the version below, which appeared in my weekly newspaper column as "Thanksgiving Is For Giving Thanks."

One unseasonably lovely November afternoon a few weeks ago, my husband, Richard and I drove over the mountains to Denver. We left on time for once, the weather and traffic cooperated, and we arrived in the Metro Area before rush hour got crazy.

I should have known things were going too smoothly.

We had planned to bring dinner to my parents, who live near the city. But when we arrived at their senior community, we learned that my mom been taken to a nearby hospital, with my dad accompanying her.

We drove straight there, and found my mother in a room off the busy ER, looking tiny under a mound of blankets and attached to a plethora of tubes and wires and monitors. She was sitting up though, and devouring her hospital dinner.

Turns out that the sore throat she had reported when I called the previous weekend had been the beginnings of pneumonia. Hence the antibiotics dripping into her veins from one bag and the saline solution from another, plus oxygen chuffing into her nose, and electrodes attached to her chest to monitor her heartbeat.

Now that she was stable, she was slated to be transferred to a regular room. So we drove my dad back to their apartment and fed him dinner.

By that time, Richard and I had almost forgotten why we ventured the long drive to Denver in the first place--almost. Our destination was another hospital, where Richard was scheduled to meet with Oncology to learn what's next in the journey that began with him hallucinating birds more than two months ago and continues through treatment for brain cancer.

By the time we left the city the next afternoon, headed back home over the mountains, my mother had improved so much that she hoped to be discharged from the hospital the next day. And we had conferred with Richard's oncologist, who explained that his tumor, a Grade 3 Astrocytoma for those who track these things, is serious enough that they want to treat it aggressively.

That means radiation to start, accompanied by chemotherapy to enhance the cell-killing effect, and then a course of chemo by itself.

That's where Thanksgiving comes in: Our two-hospital trip reminded me of why I give thanks. Not just on Thanksgiving, or just for the turkey, no matter how delicious it and the trimmings might be.

No, what I give thanks for on this holiday and every day is not stuff--nor the chance to stuff myself with food, nor money, power, or prestige.

My giving-thanks list is short, comprised of the essentials that I believe are worth more than any things or money: Sharing my days with Richard, my mother's recovery, being part of a far-flung-in-distance but close-in-heart community of family and friends, the gift of practicing our art and writing, and of being able to live in a generous and sustainable way in a place we love.

Those blessings are what make every day Thanksgiving for me.

Notice that both versions begin with almost the same words, and tell the same story. But the blog version, besides being longer, includes more details of the actual events. It's memoir-in-the-making: here's what's happening, and how it affects my life, plus a bit of the lessons I take from it. The newspaper column version gives an abbreviated version of the events, and then teases out a connection to Thanksgiving (the week the column will run). It's an opinion piece, not a news piece, but it's actually less personal than the blog post, with a tie-in to a more universal meaning. Essentially, it says, "This is what has happened in my life, and it reminds me of things we can all think about and learn from." Both versions are memoir, both tell the same story from my life; where they differ is in the voice and interpretation.

Here's an exercise to practice with your writing: take a story you've been working on. Write it out, and then go back and write it a different way: choose a different beginning, a different voice, add musings about what it means.... Then compare the two versions, read critically, and see what each has to tell you!

The Daily Grace of Haiku

When my new media expert badgered me into joining Twitter last summer, I was grumpy. What in the world could I do on Twitter, in 140 characters or less, that wouldn't just seem stupid? I thought about something my husband, Richard, taught me when he was a university professor honing his teaching skills: the concept of added value. In his case, that meant finding what he brought to teaching that students couldn't get from textbooks, videos or the internet. In applying that idea to my presence on Twitter, I thought about what I could do on Twitter that would be useful and reflect my voice and perspective.

After a bit of fumbling around, I realized, haiku. Richard and I have always played with haiku when we're on long road trips as a way to capture moments and experiences that might otherwise be forgotten in the rush of getting from A to B. (When I say we "play with" haiku, what I mean is we come up with the haiku in our heads and speak it aloud to each other as we drive along.) It occurred to me that Twitter is like a radio station of sorts, and I could post a daily haiku as a way to "broadcast" a snippet from wherever I find myself out to the social media universe, like a virtual locator beacon. "I'm here, and this what's happening in my landscape."

So I started posting a daily haiku as my contribution to Twitter. (It cross-posts on Facebook, thus saving some digital energy.) It doesn't have to be anything as grandiose as this view of the mountains that rise above our valley shot from the highway coming down the last passon our drive home. A detail can be as telling as a whole view. Sometimes something I notice in the garden prompts a haiku, like this one:

Clear dawn turns to rain
frost forecast—harvest like mad!
fall comes tomorrow.

Or this one:

Fog hid the dawn sky
then crescent moon at sunset
day passed in between.

Or something I notice as I look out the window:

Rising fast and high
fifty vultures slip-slide south
silver under wings.

The practice has made me more attentive to where I am and what's happening in the world around me, so that I've even come up with haiku from Richard's stays in the hospital, like this one from a difficult night in the ICU:

Outside snowflakes reign
inside lights blink, sensors beep
life sighs, in and out.

The gift of finding a haiku worth posting on Twitter nearly every day (I'm not perfect!) is that it asks me to find a bit of grace in the day, no matter what comes. And the practice of turning that bit of grace into haiku gives me experience in finding the essence in the moment and communicating it in words. As life-writers, it seems to me that an important part of what we're doing is finding the essence in our experiences and figuring out how to communicate it. That makes Haiku excellent practice: it's short, it exercises our vocabulary and hones our awareness, and it can be done anywhere at anytime and memorized until it can be written down.

If you want to try a daily practice of seeing and communicating via haiku, here are the basic rules:

• Three lines in a 5-7-5 pattern (five syllables in the first line, seven the second, five the third--haiku experts say that this rule isn't firm, but I find it a useful discipline)
• Based in nature or natural phenomena
• References--directly or indirectly--the season

The gift? I've found beauty and grace in the toughest moments, from Richard's time in the ICU, to the morning I woke way too early and lay in bed wide awake and tired, until I opened the blind:

Crescent edge silver
ghost moon rises escorting
Venus and Saturn.

Words to Live By

September has been an interesting month in my household, at least in the sense of the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." My husband, Richard, and I were due to spend to two weeks in a remote cabin in the San Juan Mountains, where we had been awarded a joint artist/writer retreat. Instead he landed in the hospital in Denver after he begin seeing birds--thousands of them--on our way to the cabin. There were birds everywhere: birds as tiny as house flies perched on every blade of grass and pebble, birds crowded every fence rail and utility wire, birds are large as condors appeared on distant ridge tops. He watches birds, and these were benign, so he wasn't troubled. I was: they weren't real.

Turned out he was experiencing what was probably a viral infection causing life-threatening swelling in the right frontal lobe of his brain, the area that processes visual stimuli. As I was trying to digest our swift transit from long-anticipated-retreat-in-a-remote-mountain-cabin to husband-in-the-hospital-with-swelling-of-the-brain, a friend, the novelist Jane Kirkpatrick, wrote something in an email triggered one of those "Aha!" moments, shifting my understanding in a subtle but profound way:

"This occurrence took you from your lovely cabin in the aspen grove, but sent you where you could receive what you need."

When I first read Jane's words, I was startled. Then I realized she was right. The events of late August, distressing as they were, did indeed send Richard and I to where we could receive what we need, both literally and metaphorically.

By that, I don't mean to say Richard "needed" the health issue that landed him in a Denver hospital for most of a week.

But he clearly did need to receive immediate and thoughtful medical attention, and he even needed the grueling battery of tests, the days in the hospital, and the subsequent course of treatment extending into the following weeks.

And I needed the chance to stop and reflect. Where the events that landed us in Denver instead of at the cabin in the aspen grove have sent me (at least in the metaphorical sense) is to pondering not how to get away on another residency, but how to make my every day life be more "residential" or "retreatful."
The busyness creeps in insidiously: just when I think I'm doing pretty well at staying balanced, I say "Yes" to one more deadline, one more speaking gig, one more teaching commitment, or one more kind of community involvement. Suddenly the days are cluttered with "shoulds" and I'm the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, running as fast as I can just to keep from losing ground.

The time tending to Richard's health crisis gave me enough distance to recognize that I want to make every day more like I'm on a writing residency, without leaving home.

As a start on that, I wrote up a short list of words to remind me of how I want to live and work and be:

Deliberate

Mindful

Reverence

Restful

Devoted

Contemplative.

I'm not planning on joining a religious order (I'm generally allergic to organizations and groups, especially when they involve meetings), but I do want my spirituality and my love for life to infuse my every day.

So the lesson I take from the writing residency that didn't happen is a strong message to consider how I'm organizing my life and find ways to make my days even more about doing what I love and believe in--being the change I want to see, in every moment.

That reminds me of one more word to add to my list of words to live by, perhaps the most important:

Loving.

Here's my wish for your days: Live as if you've been given a precious gift, because you have--life. Use it thoughtfully, mindfully, reverently. With love.

And write your own list of words to live by.

P.S. Richard's recovering at home, and I'm grateful to have him with me. The birds, having delivered their message, are gone, and we're working on restoring the rhythms of our lives in mindful and retreatful ways.

Writing the Hard Stuff

Difficult times hit everyone's lives. How do we write about the hard stuff? Can writing help us work our way through pain and misery, anger and grief? Sometimes.

A few weeks ago, a dear friend died in a rafting accident. As I struggled to accept the loss and find a way to not let the black cloud of grief settle solidly over my days, I realized that I needed to write as a way to honor both Carol's life and my feelings. So I wrote my own version of a personal obituary in my weekly newspaper column:

The call came on one of those afternoons when life moves so quickly that even though you're going as fast as you possibly can, you feel like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, as if you're barely keeping up.

"Susan, it's Jim," my friend said, and then paused. "I've got sad news: Carol Jacobson died yesterday in a rafting accident on the Green River."

"No," I said.

We were silent, me attempting to make sense of nonsensical news; he probably wondering what he should say.

"But she was so excited about that trip," I said, as if that could change what had already happened. "She had always wanted to run Lodore Canyon."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"What happened?"

"The raft flipped in Triplet Falls and she fell out. They picked her up in the pool at the bottom, but she never recovered consciousness."

Silence again while we both tried to digest the news.

Then we talked for a bit, remembering the previous fall when we had signed books at her store, and how she had loved books and ideas and stories--and being home in northwestern Colorado after thirty years away.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"Me, too."

That was a month ago, and I'm still trying to make sense of the news that Carol Valera Jacobson, age 54, co-owner of Downtown Books in Craig, Colorado, poet, teacher, memoirist, storyteller, gardener, mom to three grown sons, re-married barely two years, is dead.

We had just "talked" in email a few days before, as she was getting ready for the raft trip. She asked for advice on dealing with slugs and grasshoppers in her garden; she nudged me about arranging my trip to sign books at her store and talk to her memoir-writing classes; she wanted information on writing workshops I'll be teaching.
And then she fell out of a raft going over a series of drops in Lodore Canyon and she's gone. Just like that.

Carol lit up a room. She loved life--people say that, but Carol really did, and was engaged in every moment of it, from gardening to giving the best hugs and laughing whole-body laughs, to improving downtown Craig, the ranching and oil town where she had grown up and to which she had returned six years ago to be closer to family.

More than 400 people came to her memorial service, and the tears and laughter and remembrances went on for two hours.

I keep thinking of things I need to tell her. And then I remember she's gone.

I want to honor Carol's life, and her passion for stories and literacy and for the community of land and people there in Moffat County.

I want to carry forward her laugh and her stubborn genius for making good things happen; I want to be the writer she believed I am.

And I want to make sense of the door that closed with her sudden death, and watch for the one I'm sure she's holding open somewhere else.

Writing--whether it's about difficult times, difficult memories, or difficult feelings--can open that door. It can help us find a way through times that are tough, a way out of emotions that threaten to swamp us. And it can be a way to honor our losses and the scars we carry, those lessons that we wouldn't have chosen to learn, but which shape our lives.

 

(Carol Valera Jacobson in Downtown Books, Craig, Colorado)

This one's for you, Carol. My love and blessings go with you as you continue on this great journey, wherever it may take us.....