Deck Thoughts
It’s my first work morning on the deck since last fall. I’ve cleaned the glass-top table and brought out the old seat cushions.
Now, instead of the clickety-clack of computer keys, I hear the drone of a chain saw, distant traffic noise, small birds chittering.
There is plenty of mental effort required for the writing I do, but once outside all I see are the physical chores: tying down the climbing rose, chopping up the dead wood, preparing the garden for spring.
It’s a bit overwhelming until I remind myself of this: We’re here to labor, to try and fail, to wonder and to grow.
Digital Trail
I’m not a big Facebook user. I remember posting vacation photos on the social media site once years ago — and realizing how much control I lost when I did that. I’ve been skittish about the site ever since.
But I give away data all the time, in ways great and small. The books I order, the words I write, the tweets I tweet — all leave a digital trail. All I can do is make it a faint one.
Privacy has been on my mind these days, what with revelations that Facebook sold user data to Cambridge Analytica. I was amused to learn that an enterprising AP photographer was able to snap a picture of the talking points that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had in front of him at yesterday’s congressional hearings.
The New York Times reports this tidbit: “Resign? Founded Facebook. My decisions. I made mistakes. Big challenge, but we’ve faced problems before, going to solve this one. Already taking action.” And, if he had been asked if Facebook should be broken up, Zuckerberg was prepared to say: “U.S. tech companies key asset for America. Breakup strengthens Chinese companies.”
It’s a fitting irony that Zuckerberg was outed not by social media but by old-fashioned media. Long live the camera … and the pen!
(Savvy Facebook users might learn that this was my high school.)
View from a Garret
Over the weekend I stayed with friends in the city and slept in a third-floor bedroom. When I saw the slanting eaves, the bed tucked up by the two windows, I wanted to cry out with delight.
It’s not that I don’t love my own house, my own bed. It’s cozy here, and warm. I like our house and neighborhood.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t crave a garret. To be writing up there would be to channel Jo March, with her apples and her writing smock. A romantic notion? Of course!
From what I gather, the derivation of the “writer in a garret” phrase was the English writer Samuel Foote, who said that an author’s fate was to be “born in a cellar and liv[e] in a garret.” Bohemian poverty has been celebrated in literature throughout the last couple of centuries.
But it’s not the poverty I like about the garret; it’s the combination of coziness and expansiveness. And it’s the view. It’s being able to look out over rooftops and treetops. It’s perspective — something I think all writers (and all people, for that matter) need.
A Place for Everything
Sometimes on mornings at home, in what I know is an elaborate form of procrastination, I tidy up before I begin writing. It’s part compulsion. I like to look up from the screen and see some order in the universe — even if the order is only that I moved the covered rocking chairs from in front of the deck door so they don’t block the view.
This morning while putting papers in the recycling bin and tucking a cloth bag up on a shelf where I keep shopping bags … I thought about the phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
I’m a big believer in this. It’s how I keep from losing things (including my mind).
The problem with this method is that I avoid the place where much of the stuff I’m moving should actually go — and that is what we used to call the circular file, the wastebasket.
So much of my tidying is a futile attempt to stem the flow. Until I purge — really purge — my tidying up will only be of the most superficial order. But this morning, like so many others, a superficial order is all I need.
There’s a place for me, too — and it’s sitting on this couch, typing on these keys.
A Woman, Writing
This morning I passed a woman in the lobby. She was sitting in a chair, writing in her journal.
Not tapping on her phone, not scrolling down the tiny screen. But engaged with the paper and the pen.
I noticed this not only because I believe in it and practice it, but because it is so rare.
When you address the page, the page does not talk back to you. It absorbs your words, the wise and the silly. It gives you space, a blank expanse without spell-check or word complete. For that reason, it is serene, even empowering.
Today is International Woman’s Day. I just wrote and posted a story to celebrate it. But when I think of Woman’s Day 2018, what I’ll keep in mind is not a year of marches and #metoo. It’s the quiet communion of writer and page. It’s the image of a woman writing.
(Pensive, a painting by Edmund Blair Leighton)
Deadlines, Real and Imagined
Writing this blog is completely voluntary, of course. No one is paying me to do it, no one is expecting me to do it. Which is why, when things are especially crazy at work, I post here later in the day.
Today has been one of those days. Having waited all day for a logical stopping point, I’ve finally given up. I’m writing now at an illogical stopping point — meaning that I still have work to complete before close of business.
Ironically, it’s often when I telecommute that I don’t post here until later in the day. Overcompensation, a different routine, real deadlines interfering with imagined ones.
But which are more important? The real ones demand response, will get it one way or the other. The imagined ones can slip away. Does that not make them the ones that need me most?
Seems that way to me.
(Rushing here, rushing there. But at least I’m not riding Metro today.)
Post Patience
As I slowly rebuild the blog’s home page inventory, I’m reminded of its original intent:
The snow has clung to every available surface. The most spindly branches of the forsythia have “Vs” of snow, and I can imagine the accumulation, patient and slow, crystal attracting crystal until little pockets formed. I hope this blog will be the same, a slow, patient accumulation of words.
Today I focus on the patience part of this equation. Patience has never been my strong suit. In the little inventory I sometimes take at the end of the day — when could I have been kinder or stronger? — many failures come down to impatience, wanting to check off a box, complete a task, rather than waiting a while, living with the the slight discomfort of uncertainty.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”
That will be my mantra today, to live with what is unsolved, to love the questions themselves.
What Happened?
Yesterday I wrote my entry as I always do, pushed “publish,” and checked to make sure the blog post was there. It was … but nothing else. Instead of 14 posts on the page, there was only one. The other posts are reachable, but you must click on them from the right-hand column. Not a catastrophe, but not what I wanted to see at the beginning of my day.
It was, as usual, a hectic morning. I was already late. So I came into the office, hoping that when I arrived and checked the blog, it would have magically fixed itself. This is something I believe in, by the way. I’ve known many appliances that have fixed themselves — phones and computers and maybe, once, an answering machine.
This was not one of those times.
So now I’m writing today’s post, hoping that when I push “publish,” it will appear on the page — along with its 13 lost cousins.
Here goes …
(Choosing a calm photograph this morning!)
Morning of Words
It’s a quiet morning, the stock market is tanking, the government open again after a five-hour shutdown during the night, and I sit here perfectly content with my books, journal and laptop. Not that I’m living in a bubble or anything!
But truly, what can you do? We live in concentric circles, do we not? And when the outer orbits are caustic or frayed, we pull inward, to what makes us happy, what makes us whole.
What’s making me happy now is reading Ursula Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017). I was going to say it was her last book, but am glad I checked. Looks like there’s at least another one coming out.
Here is a passage I marked to copy later:
I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.
I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.
And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are build and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.
Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.
