How to Write in a Circle

I have been writing lately. Not a lot, and not especially directed.

I have been writing in short bursts, while waiting in doctor's offices and therapist's waiting rooms and restaurants. Writing in a red Moleskine journal with a pack of Stabilo markers. A rainbow of words: notes on the weather, on the spring flowers gently breaking the back of winter, the light at play under a scrim of clouds, a maple moon hanging sweet in the star-bright night. Snippets of overheard conversations. Measures of my own emotional climate, changeable as it is. Definitions, quotes, notes from books that are like these rivers feeding into me.

Most importantly, I have been writing in a Circle. I have been taking part in a writing group, Zee's Writing Circle. Writers, all women, gather in a circle of mismatched chairs and write on a particular prompt, or "Spark," for one hour. The "Spark" may be an object, a photograph, a quotation that helps a story emerge--memoir, poetry, fiction.

After that hour of intense writing, we eat a piece of chocolate (sweet reward!) and then we read aloud our stories. Listening to an annotated list of items purchased at the hardware store, we hear the story of a person's life and loves. We revisit a long-shuttered bookstore, imagine Tulip Queens and drunken firemen, hear the booming voices of shopkeepers and the sweet lisping voices of toddlers.

We write about ourselves and the people near and dear to us, both real and invented; visit places of memory or imagination, some paradises, others plagued by disaster or littered with disquieting portents of danger.

As I have been listening with deep attention to these amazing stories that emerge in one short hour during Circle, I am being nudged to accept something that a very wise person clarified for me:  

Writing is a sacred practice, involving reverence and devotion.
Writing is entering a sacred space.
Writing is slipping into sacred time: past, present, and future in one.

And believe me when I say that I don't use the word "sacred" lightly, or easily. I use the word in the sense of something essential to life and the conscious living of it, the "unnameable, indescribable source of life and consciousness that pervades every particle of reality." (Nancy J. Napier, Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.)

When I embrace writing as sacred practice, I discover through words a joyful mix of spirit and grace and love and laughter. As I write, I notice. I notice and am inexplicably moved by the gentle swaying of a linen banner caught in a breath of air; my Loki-boy catching a falling gold leaf on the palm of his hand. I find joy singing through me when I find the right words to put to the melody of objects. When I write, really write, I dive deep. I slip into some hidden pool within myself and access forgotten memories, making new connections as I weave a story from them. As I put myself in the head and heart of a character, I call on my reserves of empathy and compassion.  

It's not easy for me, this practice. I have to lift the barriers of inattention and distraction and exhaustion and depression and let myself practice this sacred act of writing--this sacrament of pen and paper or pixels and screen.

When I do so, I am alive, open to myself and the world and the everyday expression of the sacred.

(Whoa, my sacred time is up! Even Priestesses of the Word have to emerge every now and then from sacramental practice in the Temple of Type to shuttle a child to math tutoring, make a lemonade pick-me-up for another, and feed hungry children. :) )

True Confessions About Color

"Why do Mexicans like bright colors?"

That's what a friend asked me in college.

I was simultaneously stunned at the stereotype coming from this intelligent, well-read person and stumped for how to respond.

I hate to admit it, but I spent a lot of years after that running away from color. Earth-toned sweaters, gray t-shirts, black turtlenecks became my wardrobe staples, worn over khakis or faded blue jeans.

As if I could hide my ethnicity under dun camouflage.

But you know what? Color has seeped back into my wardrobe and my life. Color is sneaky that way. Color can't be contained.

My closet still has its share of neutrals, but they share space with my happy tangerine sweater, a breezy safflower cable-knit pullover, my coral pink and turquoise t-shirts, a deep red Valentine of a blouse, my orange-and-red winter boots. My journals pulse with stories written in rainbow-hued markers and collages in a riot of colors.

Color is the expression of life: sunlight focused through a broken bottle to form a tiny rainbow on the wall, the upwelling of spirit and grace as a flower bursts into bloom, the pulsing of blood beneath a rosy cheek on a winter day.

Color makes me happy.

For more true confessions about color, head over to the paintedparrot, a new online literary journal curated by writer and editor (and my inspiring and true friend) Zee Zahava. The first post is a collection of "true" sentences about color written by 65 writers of various ages.

Eva Zeisel, "A Maker of Things"

 "We are actually concerned with 'the playful search for beauty'. . . . The word 'playful' is a necessary aspect of our work because, actually, we have to . . . make, produce, lovely things throughout all of our life. . . . So, how can you, without drying up, make things with the same pleasure, as a gift to others, for so long?"
          --Hungarian-born ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011)

Ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel passed away in late December, at age 105. Over a career that spanned 80 years, Zeisel had a profound impact on modern design. She played with color and form, inventing a sinuous vocabulary that translated equally well into tiles, rugs, and furniture as it did into her iconic tableware. Her playfully curved and sweetly nesting Town and Country salt-and-pepper shaker set was, she noted in a TED talk in 2001, "a portrait of my daughter and myself."

I keep coming back to Zeisel's idea of play as a fuel for lifelong creativity. I rarely allow myself that freedom to play, to give myself over wholly to messing around with paint and paper and glue in an open-ended way.

This morning, I gave myself the gift of some play time. I sat down and worked on a collage, this one focused in part on Zeisel's work. I happened upon some word combinations that would be fun to explore further (e.g. "A bee lost its way."). I let myself try some techniques without worrying about whether they would work or not. And, just as with my earlier collage, I was surprised at the little cropped vignettes I ended up with.

Most importantly, I had FUN!

I hope you have some time to play this weekend. Please feel free to share your creative wanderings in the comments section; I'd love to hear where you ended up.

Happy Valentine's Day

"Let your heart open now, and let love flow from it; then extend this love to all beings."

--Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Extend it even to the lady who cut me off in the parking lot yesterday?

Yeah.

Even to people who do even more terrible things to each other?

Yeah.

OK. 

I'll try.

Moon-eating Fish Castle

Thaw

While northern Europe is suffering under a deep freeze, we've had two weeks of unseasonably warm weather in upstate New York. The highs have reached well into the 50s F, even the low 60s. Yesterday the sun beckoned. I declared a personal San Lunes (Saint Monday) holiday and spent the entire morning outside.

There are puddles and muck everywhere from two recent snowmelts. It still freezes overnight, so a thin coat of ice covers the puddles. Freeze-and-thaw circles are scribbled on the surface of the water. Still-vibrant fall leaves float as if trapped in resin.

Early February is much too early for the Great Thaw. (Punxsatawney Phil can tell you that.) I'm enjoying the ease of getting around this winter. But I feel a little un-easy about it as well. Is the warm weather a result of climate change or just a normal climate fluctuation? (Scientific American reports that the immediate cause of the dry, warm winter is the strange behavior of the jet stream.) 

Whichever it is, I know we need a return of colder temperatures and more snow. Fruit trees need a certain amount of cold days to maintain their period of dormancy, essential for spring flowering. Plants and our reservoirs need a good solid snowpack for the snowmelt in the spring. Animals are affected by a mild winter as well. They come out of hibernation early, hungry at a time when food sources are scarce. This coming summer we may see an increase in mosquitoes and deer ticks because of the warm winter. 

And spiritually? I have come to rely on a cold, snowy January and February to do a little emotional hibernating of my own. I read; I meditate; I stew about issues great and small. It's sometimes an insular and painful period. But it's a spiritual requirement for introverted me, a sort of emotional fattening that prepares me for a more gregarious spring and summer. I wonder what sort of emotional climate I'll look forward to without it?

**You may notice from the highly processed photos that I've been playing around with Photoshop lately. I like unedited and gently touched photos. But I wanted to experiment with enhancing my photos to more clearly convey nature's emotional impact on me, to express its poetry as I receive it. Please check out Helena Cooper's photography for some stunning examples of how processing--and of course her clear eye and sharp focus on color and pattern--can render a photograph like an abstract and deeply emotional painting.

A Lowering Sky

I took a walk at the arboretum today, under a lowering sky. It’s been over a year since I’ve been there, and I’m not sure why I’ve neglected it, and myself. It’s a place that fills up my soul with the poetry of the trees and leaves and branches and blossoms.

The arboretum is a beautifully carved bowl, a vestige of an old farm. It’s a manufactured landscape in the best sense of the word. Master gardeners have shaped the vistas with an understanding of what the eye will appreciate through the seasons.

The arboretum has been designed by human hand, but nature still holds sway. There is accidental poetry to be found all around: in the crinkled leaf staked by a red stem, in the tendrils of a vine curled tightly around a branch, in the tired branches of an old willow, in the sensuous curve of the bulb of a skunk cabbage.

Emotions sometimes overwhelm me when I walk in the arboretum and notice little details. I was so excited to see the first skunk cabbages that have emerged in the soggy ground under the huge old tree among the moss and dried leaves. I felt giddy, like seeing an old friend in an old haunt. I felt happy that I remembered the first time I had seen them, happy to remember the friend I walked with when I saw them in the marsh, happy to remember the sense of accomplishment I felt after researching and writing a poem about the plants.

The skunk cabbage and I share a history; we have formed a connection. What a feeling of rightness it was to see those skunk cabbages coming up again in the same place, at about the same time as previous winters (maybe a little early?). They have cycled through the seasons and are emerging, just as I feel I have been doing lately. They are a reminder to pay attention, to notice not one but several skunk cabbages in various stages of emergence still partially hidden under the brown leaves.

After my walk, as I was driving home, my body felt heavy and light at the same time. My face felt a heavy numbness from the wind, a heaviness that felt peaceful, like I had worked just hard enough to deserve a rest. My limbs felt similarly heavy and peaceful, but there was a stirring of lightness around my chest and shoulders, a happy fluttering of my heart and a lifting of my shoulders, as if little wings or skittering leaves had attached themselves to my shoulders and were helping to lift them up, boost my spirits, lift them of a heavy burden.