Foraging, or Making Something from Nothing

"Nopales and tunas," Photo courtesy of MaryHelen Gallego (Photograndma)

My memory vexes me. It's spotty; it doesn't always perform on command. I remember faces really well, but names are often elusive. I often have to pluck a name, with great effort, from my memory by making it travel sideways through a series of associations to greet a friend I haven't seen for a while. Precise terminology and anything related to numbers--statistics and dates especially--seem even more diffuse and hard to recall as I get older.

It's scary not to remember something that you once knew so well. When I was in first grade, the age my youngest son is now, I had a vague sense that life was static and that I would always live in Freer, Texas and be best friends with Elsa Garza and Gilda Lopez and remember how tall and imposing but sweet Mrs. Hatch, our teacher, was. It's disconcerting to get to a certain age and realize that, other than a few friends, I don't remember the names of my first grade classmates who loomed so large in my emotional world at that time. And the adults that I counted on to know things--family stories, genealogy, the year of the great hurricane, the location of my Uncle Leo's first apartment, the recipe for grandma's empanadas--are getting hazy in their memories as well or have passed away. 

When I am sitting down in front of my computer to write or sitting in the circle of my writing group, this awareness of my memory's limitations makes me anxious because the writing of fiction for me seems so intertwined with memory. 

A character's clothing or personality, a setting real or imagined, the events that form a story--all are rooted somewhere in the writer's memory. 

Inspiration bubbles up from the well of memory: fragments of a remembered dream, the imagery from an oft-repeated story, the melody of a song, the name of a flower or tree, a frozen treat or childhood game.

Memories of past experiences, as a participant or merely an observer, inspire and add verisimilitude to a story. Historical facts and obscure bits of knowledge, augmented by research, flesh out details of a story's setting or events.

Given how spotty recall can be, memories become a form of fiction as well. The brain fills in details when memory fails, creating a story that is part truth and part invention.

I've been learning that, spotty, fictionalized memory or no, I have to just plunge in to the writing and see where it leads me. And sometimes memory and its associations lead me to very unexpected places.

In late May I sat next to my daughter at a mother-daughter writing workshop at the public library. The inspiration was a table quilted with Pantone color swatches. My daughter chose blues and greens and wrote (with clarity and depth) of water and overcoming her fear of it. I chose Caramel, Cactus Flower, and Whisper Pink. Cactus Flower led me back to the nopal cactus that is native to the chaparral of South Texas, where my parents and their parents and grandparents and my siblings and I were born. Caramel made me think of making candy, and somehow the two added up to a story about making candy from the red tuna, or fruit, of the nopal. (You can read the piece, "The Color of a Prickly Pear's Heart," at Painted Parrot by clicking here.)

Even now I don't really know how I knew about prickly pear candy. When I was writing, I didn't even know if it existed for sure, though the plunging-ahead part of my writing brain took it as a given. Later on I Googled the term and emailed my dad's cousin, the family genealogist, to see if the story I wrote might have some basis in fact. I didn't need confirmation that what I was writing was true--it is fiction after all--but that it could be true. Somehow the effectiveness of the story demanded that reassurance. My relative spoke with my great-aunt and confirmed that my great-grandmother and her sister-in-law made cactus candy. 

A flood of other memories about foraging for sweet (and not so sweet) natural treats met my original question about cactus candy. My father's aunt and cousins recalled picking and eating capulis, comas, duranillios, anacuas, and moras. My great-grandfather roasted quiote, the flower of the Spanish dagger plant, which tasted like steamed broccoli stalks or boiled cabbage (how could something so exotic taste so ordinary?). My dad's cousins chewed on the sticky chaguete from mesquite trees. 

Sadly, my dad and his cousins don't have any direct memories of making cactus candy or seeing it being made. But through some sort of alchemy of memory, that story was delivered to me. I think it says something about how difficult life was for my ancestors, how they managed to raise their families on the ranches of South Texas by foraging in a dry, rugged land for whatever sweetness they could find.

Prickly pear blossoms, Scottsdale, Arizona

When I Was Little

Me (6, on right) and my sister, c. 1972 

It's so easy to get discouraged about achieving big goals: losing weight, writing a book, running a marathon, for examples. Sometimes they loom so large and feel outside the grasp of any one person living in the real-life world of working, paying bills, mowing the lawn, feeding kids, cleaning house.

I don't have any big achievements to report. However, I keep re-teaching myself the power of consistency and breaking down big goals into small, achievable outcomes.

For the last few months I have been writing twice a week. That adds up to only a few hours of writing and sometimes only a few paragraphs a week that I like. But I feel that through this consistent effort, small though it is, I am setting a good practice for myself. Each time I write it seems a little easier to step into and ride the creative waves.

I love feeling a part of a community of writers in my weekly writing group and the energy we generate at each meeting. I get so much inspiration from the stories I hear in the group. I have this empowering sense of the infinite number of stories there are to tell and ways to tell them. You can read some of these stories at paintedparrot, including a recent submission of mine: "When I Was Little."

Rotation

The globe sat on the corner of Mrs. Litchenburger's desk. My 2nd-grade classmates and I sat in rows of wooden desks facing hers. We bent over our worksheets after she had given out instructions in her calm, sweet voice. After a few minutes, a line of children would form at her desk. We probably could have worked out the math problems on our own, but at the first sign of trouble we gravitated to her desk for help, pulled by her warmth, her unlimited patience, her gentle humor.

As I waited, I picked up the stapler on her desk, liking the heft of it, the click-thunk as it incised metal lines on my worksheet. I even drew blood once from my index finger after wondering if it could pierce flesh.

But the best piece of entertainment on Mrs. Litchenberger's desk was the globe. The oceans were a light aquamarine, the continents a range of browns and greens and spots of white that blurred as I spun the globe. It was tippy when spun fast, so I held on to the metal base as I watched North America whirl past and the wide blue of the Pacific emerge from the other side. After several dizzying rotations, I pressed my finger down to stop it at a point on the vast and exotic People's Republic of China or the neighboring Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Peking. Leningrad. The place names were meaningless to me and, I have to admit, didn't evoke much curiosity. What I loved was the mad spinning that made every big city and little town and huge continent and little island seem insignificant. I enjoyed the abrupt stop and the randomness of where my finger would land.

Now, as an adult, I feel much more like the spun than the spinner, twirled about as I face the demands of even ordinary days: getting the kids out of bed and fed and on their way to sports practice and school, paying bills and looking for ways to balance the budget, keeping the clutter and germs and bugs in the house and the weeds outside the house under control, short trips for shopping or ferrying the children around, etc.

I try to stop the spinning briefly to land on some island of time that's all my own, a foreign land that is still and quiet where I can hear my own thoughts and shape them into a narrative. Most days that effort seems beyond my control, spun up and around by the appointments on my calendar, my head spinning and unfocused.

But this morning, I seem to have landed on that little island briefly, after a day of tending to a sick child and an early night. A few other things have brought me to this place of memory, of drawing lines of connections between past places and present. This morning I received an email from a dear friend who is going through earth-moving changes. An email last week from my neighbor and writing friend Natalie reminds me that it is important to visit that place of creativity as often as I can, to situate myself in the place I live now and to share its ordinary meaning and beauty with my friends and loved ones.

The web, with its ever-multiplying places to visit, seems to be spinning by me at too fast a pace to keep up with. But I wanted to share a few places where I have been hanging out lately and spending some time:

Nesting Great Blue Herons at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology
Live from Daryl's House
Monthly digital calendars (and daily creativity) from Geninne
Of Monsters and Men
Vlogbrothers (this one's from my daughter :) )
PaintedParrot (Natalie's evocative "I Would Like to Paint" is here)

I hope life is spinning around at a pace that's just right for you.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring Color

Creative Window

My Daydream Window 

"You're working on a creative problem, and then all of a sudden that feeling of progress disappears ... What you should do then — when you hit the wall — is get away from your desk. Step away from the office. Take a long walk. Daydream. Find some way to relax. Get those alpha waves. Alpha waves are a signal in the brain that's closely correlated with states of relaxation. And what scientists have found is that when people are relaxed, they're much more likely to have those big 'A ha!' moments, those moments of insight where these seemingly impossible problems get solved. So when you hit the wall, the best thing you can do is probably take a very long, warm shower. The answer will only arrive once you stop looking for it."

Jonah Lehrer, Imagine; How Creativity Works

Maple Moon

For hundreds of years before the first Europeans arrived, the Cayuga band of the Haudenosaunee (the "People of the Longhouse," also known as the Iroquois) built their timber longhouses in the area of upstate New York where I live. According to the 2000 census, more than 80,000 people in the United States are descendants of these First People.

The Haudenosaunee divide the year into lunar months, each with a name that describes an important seasonal event. Last week's full moon is known as the Maple Moon, the time when the sap starts to flow again in the maple trees after the long winter of dormancy, and maple syrup and maple sugar production begins.

That poetic name for the March full moon provided a starting point for a story that I wrote in Zee's Writing Circle, which I mentioned in my previous post. The "spark" for that particular Circle was a rainbow of Pantone color samples that Zee spread out on a table. I chose:

Nile Blue

Coral

Mimosa

(Can you see those colors in the opening photo I took of the March sunset? It was probably not coincidental that I was drawn to those particular hues.)

Zee has just started posting stories written in Circle at her online literary journal, "Painted Parrot." I hope you'll visit every Friday when she posts a new story, or perhaps even subscribe to get a story in your inbox every week. You can read my Maple Moon story by clicking here.

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. :) )