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Willow & Nahum

May 9, 2009

Today The Furrball

soaked up the sun,

ate some Beecher's "Flagship" cheddar,

watched the birds fly by,

posed on one of his porches,

enjoyed a harness-free yard adventure,

and breathed his last.

We miss him terribly.

Roller Coaster

This weekend was a belly-dropping dip in the feline chronic renal failure roller coaster we've been riding since September.

The Furrball, hospitalized under protest.

It's beastly, and he doesn't like it much, but he's on a 48-hour, continuous IV drip that's supposed to flush his kidneys. We'll find out if it worked on Monday.

Oh My

It's been so long, I fear I may have forgotten how to write, though every day I sit in front of my work computer and type more than a sane person should in eight hours. Funny, I hadn't thought to consider my paid work writing, but most of it is.

It's just that I'm not writing at GraceNotes, or in my journal, or on any of the scraps of paper that litter my workspace here at home, and so it feels as though I've forgotten how to write. And this scares me. But what I most fear is that I'm forgetting the fledgling, but hard-won, skill of tapping into my heart, of opening my mind and my time to inspiration—and just seeing what happens.

I don't know if setting a creativity goal for myself will get me any closer to learning to write my heart in the minutes I have available between tasks, but I know that if I don't start stretching my creativity muscles again soon, I'm a goner.

So, I snapped a few photos on my lunch today. The exercise felt good.

Exercise

Directions: Write a four-paragraph story using one of the following four words in each paragraph: serendipity, gargantuan, corncob, Popsicle.

-----
It was a hot afternoon. He thought he might get a Popsicle, but he didn't.

He'd intended to be on the road by noon, but he'd missed his chance. Though if he looked at it from another perspective, he could almost see how serendipity had kept him there.

He thought about how cool the freezer would feel if he could make himself get up and move through the gargantuan heaps of newspapers, Farm Journals, and boxes of paraphernalia that littered his parents' house.

He looked across the porch at his father's body, still sitting upright in the rocker, corncob pipe gripped in his hand. He remained in his chair, just for a bit longer.

hesed

a pink, shabby-chic sofa
in a Vermont four-square
divided in two

a girl, tucked in, feet up
arms around knees
slippers left below

a cup of tea
wood smoke’s pungent
afternoon companion

a heart spilled
mopped up by
an unknown soul

Words

To my surprise and everlasting delight, I'm part of a writing group. We meet a couple times a month to share our current or past or dream projects. We talk about words. We applaud well-developed characters. We can't wait for the next installment of the novel or play that so-and-so is working on. An intriguing phrase can keep us occupied for an inordinate amount of time. We inspire each other. We call ourselves Les sardines, which seems oddly inappropriate for people who first met just seven months ago, but we gather in fairly small spaces. So.

At the suggestion of a fellow sardine, I'm beginning to write a story I told at our most recent meeting. Initially, I was holding the story up to the light, pressing my ear against its hive. Then I ran right into the story's emotional crux, and now I'm beating it with a hose, torturing a confession out of it.

This is the bit about writing that can really suck. I know that if I can get up on the skis, it'll be great, but right now I'm on my butt, my arms are burning, and I seem unable to overcome the resistance of the lake.

[I am indebted to Mr. Collins for the apropos images and to Mr. Troy for the introduction to Mr. Collins.]

"Introduction to Poetry"
from Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Mixed Up

I started a new, work-away-from-home job at the beginning of the year. And while I couldn't be more excited about what I've been hired to accomplish and the people with whom I get to work, I miss following my thoughts where ever they might lead, whenever they might decide to go there. I also miss being able to rearrange my schedule at a moment's notice in order to visit or speak with a friend.

My new work is a delight. And I have given up setting my own agenda. I made the choice to go back to full-time work perceiving some of its potential cost, and I do not regret it. I know that when the learning curve with my new job plateaus, there will be more mental and emotional energy available for the relationships and the creative endeavors that inspire and sustain me. Yet. I cannot ignore that I feel excitement, hope, and grief. Not one after the other, but all at the same time. Is there a word in our linear, category-creating language that expresses this complexity, this twined experience?

After a less than exhaustive search, the closest I've come is "muddled." Not all of Merriam-Webster's definitions for this word work for me, but "to make turbid or muddy" and "to mix confusedly" do. Excitement's pure sparkle, hope's golden glow, and grief's dark ache certainly make for a turbid, muddy, confused concoction. Hints of the straight-up emotions remain present, but together they create something completely different, the name of which I'd also like to know.

Over the past several weeks, I've been slowly making my way through Poets on the Psalms, a collection of essays edited by Lynn Domina, and I've been struck by how prevalent this all-mixed-up feeling is to the psalmists. I'd never noticed that before, so I'm grateful to the poets who've introduced this possibility to me, particularly when I'm so muddled myself.

I want to honor the experience of being muddled. The very fact that I can feel what seem to be mutually exclusive emotions simultaneously is so obviously and gorgeously human. Why would I want to be anything but what I am, who I was created to be? And yet it would appear to be, from this human's perspective, so much more efficient, not to mention less confusing, to leave the muddling to the making of Mojitos—lots of them.