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Reflections

Reflections

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I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a big-hearted book that picks you up and carries you along with it. It took me to the Africa I visited two years ago, to the sights and smells and bribes and chaos of Nigeria, just one country east of Benin.

And it took me to an America where newly arrived immigrants braid hair in low-end salons,  hoping for a break, a toehold — anything to avoid being sent back.

And finally, it took me to the book’s own beginnings.  In the Acknowledgments, Adichie thanks her family and friends, editor and agent. She thanks the latter in particular for “that ongoing feeling of safety.” And then — she thanks a room — a “small office filled with light.”

It’s a twist on Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” but singles out what for me is most important — the light. I type these words in a light-filled space of my own: windows beside and ahead, glass all around, reflections of reflections of reflections.

Living With Place

Living With Place

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I’m finishing up a book I bought a few weeks ago at the Reston Used Bookstore. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self (NeWest Press) is a collection of essays on place. The editors, Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson, have included everything from a powerful story of a drowning that forever changed the way one author came to see wild rivers to a piece about how changes to laws and landscape have robbed native Arctic peoples of community and self-sufficiency.

This morning I read an essay by M. Michael M’Gonigle in which he describes a book that he and his wife, Wendy Wickwire, wrote called Stein: The Way of the River. It describes their time of living  in a wild place, living lightly on the land, learning its rhythms and the rhythms of the people who lived on it for generations.

“The Stein may never be logged,” M’Gonigle  wrote of the book, “but now, fifteen years later, the elders that we spent time with are all dead. Here, as elsewhere in the world, with their deaths, the language of local peoples is being silenced to a whisper, and is about to disappear entirely. Here, as elsewhere, the experiences of local places, when there is yet wild spaces and spirits in those spaces, is eroding away. Here, as elsewhere, the strength and diversity and skills of a community living long with its place, and functioning together, is becoming a romantic memory. … Thus does the BIG consume the PLACE.”

“Living long with its place” — not “on,” not “beside,” not “in spite of.” But with.

Mid-Pause

Mid-Pause

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Here I’m enjoying the Great Pause, which in part has meant a blog pause, though not for long because, well, writing here is what I do.

I love the disorientation this time of year brings. Is it Monday? Tuesday? Should I start watching a movie at 10 p.m.? Why not?

The trick is to balance the vegging with small, discrete tasks. Tidy up the area under the bathroom sink. Look through one of the boxes from Lexington, Mom’s things, an activity that must be reserved for moments of lightness and strength. (Come to think of it, that may have to wait.)

Most of all, time for reading, writing, talking and walking. Four of my favorite things.

Notes to a Future Self

Notes to a Future Self

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I’m reading Paul Auster’s Report from the Interior, a memoir of mind, a book that reconstructs the awakening of consciousness. In the course of doing this, Auster laments the fact that, though he wrote stories as a child, none of his early scribblings remain.

He never much saw the point of keeping a journal, he says. The problem with the journal was that he didn’t know who he was addressing, whether himself or someone else. And if himself, he muses, then “why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as keeping a journal?”

I bristled a bit reading this passage. As a longtime journal-keeper I’m hypersensitive to journal-keeping being considered an idle or superficial exercise.

But Auster comes around. Here he is again, writing in second person, as he does throughout this book:

“You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self.”

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy

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In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance describes his unlikely journey from a chaotic childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to college, Yale Law School and a real shot at the American dream. It’s been a good book to read during this crazy election season, as we have a national conversation (shouting match) about “making America great again.”

While Vance does not disparage the government help he receives — the Pell grants and scholarships and the four years he spent in the Marine Corps that turned his life around — what made a difference for him, he says, was not policy but people: his grandparents, sister, aunts and uncles.

They were there to pick him up when he was down, to show him by example how to live his life. But they — his hillbilly tribe — have deep-seated problems of their own that government policies alone won’t solve.

To read this book is to feel both depressed at the depth of these problems and inspired that someone can surmount them. It is, also, to realize how complex are the workings of the human heart.

With Pen in Hand

With Pen in Hand

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The late Oliver Sacks was called “Inky” as a boy because he always had ink-stained fingers. He began keeping a journal at age 14 and had completed more than 600 of them by the time he died at the age of 82 in 2015. 

Sacks ended his autobiography On the Move with these words about writing’s importance in his life:

The art of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupation or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and I have been writing all day. 

 Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun,  as when I started nearly seventy years ago.

In fact, he was writing with great clarity up until days before his died, his collaborator reported. “We are pretty sure he will go with a fountain pen in hand,” she said.

I can’t think of a better way.






(No photos of pens, but here’s one of paper!)

Awe Walk

Awe Walk

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It helps us see things in new way, boosts our immune system and lowers our blood pressure. It’s even being used to treat PTSD.

The emotion of awe is gaining new respect and appreciation, says an article in Parade magazine. Being in the presence of something that is beyond human scale and understanding — the kind of feeling we get from watching a sunrise or lying under a blanket of stars — can have a profound effect on ordinary living.

Being awe-struck often has an element of surprise, though; it is, almost by definition, out of the ordinary. How to make awe a more permanent part of our day?

Drop the devices and get outside, says the article. Visit a park, museum or planetarium. Or … take an Awe Walk.

Ah, an “Awe Walk” … sounds familiar!

A Writer’s View

A Writer’s View

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Alistair Macleod’s No Great Mischief is a great-hearted tale of family and place. Set on Cape Breton Island and elsewhere in Canada, it makes me remember a trip there more than two decades ago.

What a rugged, misty place it is, the sort of place that would never leave a person. And it never left Macleod. I read this morning that he returned to his ancestral home most every summer to write exquisite short stories and this one fine novel. His writer’s cabin was perched on a cliff where he could look out across the sea to Prince Edward Island.

Some writers prefer to ply their craft in a closeted space, physically confining but mentally liberating. I prefer (though unfortunately do not practice) Macleod’s method — drawn back year after year to the place that created and nurtured me, with a simple desk and a view that captivates and frees.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Reading for Life

Reading for Life

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An article in this morning’s newspaper reports on a study that shows that people who read books survive almost two years longer than people who don’t.

Intriguing, to say the least. Do readers stay sharper, calmer, more engaged in life? Or do they simply conserve energy by all that sitting and reading?

The study was conducted by Yale University researchers and published in a journal called Social Science & Medicine. The 3,635 subjects, all older than 50, were surveyed for their reading habits and divided into three categories: those who never read, those who read up to three-and-a-half hours a week and those who read three and a half hours or more.

The conclusion: After accounting for education, income and health, book reading still confers a “significant survival advantage.”

I didn’t need an excuse, but it’s good to have one, just the same.

Olympic Teamwork

Olympic Teamwork

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Yesterday at work we had an Olympic trivia event. I guessed at every question — a testament to how little of the coverage I’ve watched so far. But last night I made an exception. I stayed up way past my bedtime to watch the women’s gymnastic team claim the gold.

It was worth the lost sleep. To see what body, mind and heart can do when working together was inspiring and humbling. 
Amplifying my Olympic frame of mind is the book I’m reading. Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat tells the story of the University of Washington men’s rowing team as they prepared for and competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. One passage stood out to me this morning: 

“The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued fourth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. … The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility — the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole — and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”