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Poetry Month

Poetry Month

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Trees have budded and bowed, petals littering the grass. Their golds are green now and shade has returned to the land. Oak tree catkins drape themselves on the azaleas and maple seeds helicopter down.

Nature seems ready to burst with all this growth and all this gladness. It needs an outlet. It needs a poem. Even this one:

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Happy National Poetry Month!

One Year

One Year

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Today marks one year at my “new” job.  I know most names, can find most conference rooms and have located a stairwell that allows me back on the fifth floor once I do my stair-climb. (Shhh… this one is confidential; all other stairwells are locked from the other side!)

Anniversaries come more quickly than they used to, especially this one. It barely seems possible I’ve been here for one complete turn around the sun.

While I’m grateful that I could find a new job, meet new people and travel to far-flung places (especially grateful for that), I’m always mindful of the clock ticking, and of Mary Oliver’s words, which I quoted here a week ago:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it it neither power nor time.

So, as I start my second year here, I’ll focus most on balance, on finding the creative path through every task. It’s not just the right way; it’s the only way.

When Minutes Fly

When Minutes Fly

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I’ve had many commutes in my life. The easiest was a stroll down the hall. The most inspiring was a walk through Central Park from the Upper West Side to Midtown Manhattan.

The one I have now involves a drive, Metro trip, bus ride and walk. I might be in as many as four vehicles on the way home, since I switch from one line to the other to avoid being squeezed in what is known here as the “Orange Crush” (for the Orange Line to Vienna, where I park my car).

All of which is to say, I have a disjointed commute. What’s consistent about it is that, unless I’m standing up and it’s too crowded to breathe, I have a book, journal or newspaper in hand. What stitches together the minutes and hours is … ( no surprise!) … the written word.

It’s amazing how quickly this makes time pass, how easy it is to miss my stop. So today I’m grateful for the words that make the minutes fly. Don’t know what I’d do without them.

Monday at Work

Monday at Work

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In many parts of the world today is an official holiday, schools and offices are closed. So when I arrived at the office before 8 in a spitting rain, I had the distinct feeling that I shouldn’t be here, that I should be working on an essay at home with a second cup of tea.

Instead, I have a few minutes for a few words. And I’m giving them to the poet Mary Oliver, from her book of essays Upstream:

It is 6 a.m., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. … There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it it neither power nor time.

Thank you, Mary Oliver. I hear you.

Delicate Revision

Delicate Revision

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Today is the birthday of the poet Billy Collins, the Writers Almanac informs me, and in the brief bio it supplied, I learn that Collins approaches revision carefully. “Revision can grind a good impulse to dust,” he says.

Collins is not one of my faves, but he’s right about this. How often have I taken a halfway decent idea and beaten the life out of it. Not because I want to, but because I can’t move forward. It’s easier to futz around with the words already on the page than to plow ahead and add some new ones.

It’s in part to sidestep this tendency that I started A Walker in the Suburbs. Jot an idea down quickly, first thing in the morning, then leave it alone. Tomorrow, get up and do the same thing. In time there will be a little ouevre of sorts, a bunch of new shoots green and growing.

Of course, I break this rule all the time. But I break it less here than I do otherwise. So here’s to delicate revision – and the restraint it takes to practice it!

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

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I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book I’d read about and had wanted to try. It’s a short book, could be consumed in one sitting, and I almost did. 
Coates sweeps you up from the first words on the page and doesn’t let you go till the end. I don’t believe in
reparations, don’t believe the chasm of race is as deep as he thinks it is. But then, I’m white. I am, in his parlance, a Dreamer, someone (white or black) who shares the dream of American exceptionalism that is built
on the subjugation of the black body. Because the body is all, according to
Coates. There is no savior, no soul or mind that lives beyond the body’s end.
But I’m not writing about this book to debate its thesis but
to marvel at its prose and its power to sweep me up in an idea I don’t believe in and make me feel its force. His idea is an ocean wave, and we readers are the shore. Given time, it might wear us down.

I read this and think about my own story, my own lens. I don’t
see the world in black and white, but I see
divisions. The gulf
between the moneyed and the non, for example, and the canyons that yawn between the left and the right.
The passion Coates brings to his story is the passion each of us can bring to our own. 
The Return

The Return

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The “return” key of my little Mac laptop (the key called “enter” for all you PC types) had been growing balkier by the day, so on Sunday I took it to the doctor — the Apple store’s “Genius Bar” in my local mall.

I worried there would be a gloomy assessment — perhaps I would need another keyboard or even another machine.

But no, it was good news. All that was required was to flip off the key top and replace the pad underneath. “A piece of dirt may have gotten in there,” the technician said. (Really?! A piece of dirt in my house?) And apparently the machine is so delicately calibrated that even a minuscule crumb can bend the little tabs that hold this responsive pad in place beneath the key.

I shudder to think of what this means for the future. I mean, I’m careful with my computer, but I can’t use it in a vacuum. But I was lucky this time. The return was repaired in 10 minutes and I was once more back to fluid typing — which, like so many other things in life, one fails to appreciate until it goes away.

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.

Letter from Sumba

Letter from Sumba

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A few months ago I traveled around the world — a trip that came together so quickly and with so many appointments and interviews packed in that I have to pinch myself now to believe that it really happened.

I have the photos to prove it, though, and, as of late last week, I also have a story about it on the Winrock website: Letter from Sumba. 

It’s the first of several stories based on reporting from that trip, I hope. And it’s gratifying because it translates the long flights and disorientation into words and photos.

It doesn’t capture everything, of course: how muggy it was that day, how storm clouds rolled in but the rain held off, how the ocean looked on the night drive back to our hotel. But it chronicles some of it. Enough, I hope.

Pre-Dawn Haul

Pre-Dawn Haul

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Today I woke up early. Was it the rain? Was it a dream? Does it matter?

So I came downstairs and started looking through old file folders. This was not a completely random exercise. I needed notes I’d kept in one of them.

I found much more. There were two pieces I’d forgotten I’d written, a letter from a former student telling me that one of her essays was about to be published, and a solicitation for an author to write a book on creative praise programs across the top of which I’d scribbled, “For the ‘Can you believe it?’ file. “

The solicitation went something like this: Smart managers are learning that to keep Gen X and Gen Y workers happy requires celebration mailboxes, applause notes, prize packages, even balloons and confetti. A potential author would be familiar with these kind of programs and able to write a book about them. My question: Would a person familiar with such programs have not already slit his or her wrist?

Still, not a bad pre-dawn haul for a unrepentant packrat. How glad I am that I looked through those files and found what I did. I start the day a little more cheerfully now. Not praised but amused, which is much better.