Thoughts in Random Patterns

Knitting

The Year of Living Alphabetically hasn't turned out the way I planned -- but then again, very few things seem to.  I'm accepting defeat or reality or failure or whatever and giving up on this project so I can get back to just blogging and reconnect to my community of readers. 

I still think it's an interesting idea to structure time around words or concepts rather than around a Calendar and a Task List, and I have a fun list of alphabetical topics that I had all kinds of good intentions of writing about:

• Innovation / Introversion / Inspiration
• Journey vs. destination / Julie & Julia / Joy / Justice (vs. Peace, South Africa Truth & Reconciliation)
• Kindness
• Language / Learning / Lists / Love
• Meditation / Middle Path
• Nature / Nature Conservancy
• Organized (Zero Sum possessions) / Observer vs. participant / Optimist
• Privacy (celebrity culture, right to privacy, thesis "Right to be let alone" Brandeis 1905)  / Patience / Persistence / Potential / Peace
• and Quiet / Question authority / Quality (Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
• Rest and Relaxation (renew / retreat / restore)
• Safari (Africa in May)
• Travel / Trust

I'm still working on learning to fail faster.  The goal of having a blog is not to set myself up with another set of expectations that I'm not meeting and to feel bad about not writing; it's to have an open venue to share my writing.

My summer of writing in Keystone worked very well for me.  I immersed myself in my apparently never-ending novel and made good progress on The North Side of Trees.  I hiked some, read some, and deeply enjoyed the freedom of entire weeks without a single appointment on my calendar.  It was entertaining to let my introvert self have free rein.  My theory was that I'd come back to Boulder this fall and switch into extrovert mode, but that hasn't turned out the way I planned either.  I've loved reconnecting with friends and family, but my introvert self really loves solitude and contemplative time.  I remember a teacher, Wes Nisker, at a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock being asked when he had developed a committed daily meditation practice, which he had been doing for over 30 years.  He answered, "When I needed to."  I cherish my alone time.  I still haven't needed to develop a daily meditation practice, but I find that my self, and therefore my days, are calmer if I take / make time for silence and solitude.

An old dormant skill that I revived this summer in which I'm finding a nice mix of creative productivity and meditative quiet time is knitting.  My father taught me to knit when I was a young girl, but I hadn't made anything craft-y since I crocheted a couple of afghans during college, which makes it more than 20 years ago.  My mother-in-law, Cecelia, is a beautiful knitter and raved about the yarn store in Frisco during an extended stay in Keystone during the summer of 2008.  I decided that I would have / make / take time this summer to sit and enjoy making gifts with my very own hands. 

The first thing I made was a simple repeat pattern scarf for my Mom's birthday in August:

  

Then I made a more complicated basketweave pattern scarf with a ribbed edge for my sister Martha's birthday in September.  The photographs don't do justice to the vibrancy of the alpaca yarn since they're against the background of my gray desktop.

 

Then I used the same pattern and yarn but in a different color for a scarf for Cecelia's birthday, also in September.  I was extra careful to go back and tear out any mistakes and knit again since I really wanted her scarf to be as close to perfect as I could get it.  I loved this blue color for her.

And the back or "wrong" side is very square and regular, too:

 
And then I used the same basketweave pattern with a chunky alpaca yarn called Urban Autumn on big fat needles for my friend Ilana's birthday scarf in October.  It's great how variegated yarns make their own color pattern within a stitch pattern. 

 

 
  

I'm working on a two different projects now, one of which isn't even a scarf!  Part of the fun of knitting is that you can increase the difficulty as you achieve mastery so that you're often working in a flow state -- and it's a nice meditation to think lovingkindness thoughts of the recipient of the gift as you knit along. 

Q3 - The Blogging Habit

It's hard for me to believe how long it has been since I've posted -- the entire second quarter of 2006 just zoomed by, and I completely fell out of the blogging habit.  In the middle of March I started a six week period of working intensively on my novel, and any other kind of writing felt like a distraction.  And then we went to Paris for the month of May, and Brad did a great job of tracking our time there.  June was a manic month, with literally just three nights at home alone with Brad (June 4th and 5th following our return from Paris and June 27th (the night before heading out for 6 weeks)).  And here we are, in July.  Wheeee.

But there was more to my hiatus than just being busy -- after all, I'm always busy.  The commitment to six weeks of concentrated work on The North Side of Trees required a more focused approach than my usual wide range of daily activities.  I worked hard, and I was tired at the end of the days, and definitely didn't feel like writing any more -- and I didn't have much to say about daily life.  "Went to writing office, wrote, came home," summed things up for just about the entire six weeks.  I'm definitely not alone in this experience of finding that working on a novel is an entirely different thing than blogging.  Blogging had been a great way of keeping the writing juices flowing during times when I wasn't working much on the novel.  Write, post.  Write, post -- without anxiety or worrying about what people might think.  A kind of writing meditation for me.  And it has been an efficient / lazy way of putting energy into a lot of relationships all at one time, which was great for an introvert like me.  I could let my friends and family know what I've been doing / thinking without having to spend time on the telephone, which worked well for me.

And so working on other writing was a positive reason for not blogging.

And the clearly negative reason was nasty, personal attack comments both to me, and to Brad, especially around his Boston marathon in April.  Real attacks, not just comment spam, which is annoying, but comments where an actual human (or a marginal facsimile of one) took the time/energy to write really ugly things on my blog.  I'm not a celebrity (nor do I play one on t.v.), but sometimes find myself unsympathetic to their complaints about paparazzi and lack of privacy because of the public nature of the celebrity life.  And so I, in my tiny analogous way, decided that I'm open to the slings and arrows of public opinion if I do public writing, which is what a blog is.  I took a break to see what mattered more to me -- avoiding the crap that comes from putting an opinion out into the world, or accepting that there is plenty of Crazy and Angry out there and writing anyway.  I had an email exchange with Fred Wilson about this over a year ago and he encouraged me to ignore the angry crazies and move on -- thanks, Fred.

I'm turning off Comments for now -- I don't get a lot of comments anyway, and if you're my friend or family, you can send me email, which I'll answer in my usual haphazard way.

And the issue in the middle ground of blogging that I'm still thinking about is that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, a life lived with a constant eye to writing about it isn't much of a life either.  Seeing one's life as a means to an end as an observer meant only for writing fodder is one of the admittedly mild "dangers" of writing, and of blogging in particular.  It's like people who travel with a video camera attached to their faces instead of actually experiencing a place.  It's some kind of magical "Let's save this moment for the future" thinking -- I just don't think the writing life works like that.  "Dream dreams, and write them; aye, but live them first."

And maybe that's why I still haven't finished The North Side of Trees.  I'm living a great life.. and I'm going back to blogging about it now.

Scribbles: Cy Twombly

Last night, after a full day of writing work at my Spruce Street office with Brad, I was tired in that good way you get after really concentrated work.  We watched the first episode of the final season of The Sopranos.  After such a long hiatus between episodes, I had forgotten both how violent it is, and how sad.  Then we turned OFF the television and read books.  What a revolutionary concept!  I took one of the big art monographs off the top of one of several Unread Books piles on the coffee table and got lost in the world of Cy Twombly, who is one of my very favorite artists.  He has used similar motifs of writing and scribbles and letters and fragments of words throughout his long working life.  I like art that includes text and words and have been fortunate enough to see Twombly's work in person in San Francisco and New York.  After a long day of writing by hand and typing, it was very restorative to slowly savor books of creative art that incorporates myth and language, too.

39 1/2

Today is my 39 1/2 birthday.  I'm celebrating by spending the day in my Spruce Street writing office, working on The North Side of Trees.  That's the short version of a funny tale that involves Carribbean islands and apple orchards and boundaries.  In a long, far flung conversation over afternoon tea in Boston last October with Pamela Daniels, (who I am still stunned to have been fortunate enough to have as my college dean lo these many years ago), she asked me what I needed to be able to finish writing my book and I answered that I thought I needed to go away from my daily life for 6 weeks and leave obligation behind. 

I considered 3 different geographies:  a farm in north Texas belonging to my in-laws, a bed and breakfast in an apple orchard in western Colorado belonging to an extra-extended family member, and an oceanside house in the Bahamas belonging to a longtime Boulder friend, and eventually made all the arrangements to go stay in the Carribbean for 6 weeks, starting last Sunday, March 12th.  Toward the end of the week, Brad developed a bad cold (thought he might have strep throat, but didn't) and didn't want to fly all day on Sunday for fear his head might explode, so we delayed our departure date until today -- and I noticed myself feeling relieved about being home the extra couple of days and thinking that I didn't really want to go -- so we didn't.  Many big thanks to my friend Lindsey for offering her home as my writing place, and then for being her usual Buddhist calm and flexible self about me changing my mind!

I looked at all the great things about living here in Boulder, including my incredible husband, house, dogs, friends, family, landscape, town, bookstore, and my very own writing sanctuary full of books and music and calm and thought that I really need to figure out a way to do my work here, where my life is -- so I'm going to do that for the next 6 weeks instead of taking a geographical cure.  I'm going to hibernate and let my obligations fend for themselves and just focus on doing my writing work.  My desk at home is already mostly buried in the daily papers of life, and I'm just going to let things keep piling up around me as I plow ahead toward finishing the first draft of this book.  I'm going away from my daily life, but I'm staying here in Boulder..

Poem: The Last Days of the Year

Sometimes the days must

fly by

as they say,

one year palms

inhabited by wind and rain,

the wet smell of wool

in the Berber markets,

the next our room

on Isola Tiberina

off the little Piazza

San Bartolomeo, river-damp

with the river patrol

at the point, waiting

to drag out the suicides

and driftwood.

Above Italy

the skyline is cypress,

black imago pressed

against the pale mauve

of Roman winter sunset.

You're out looking

for something in the shops

off the Corso and I'm sitting over

the Tiber, remembering that

one night last year

I went deep into the markets

of Marrakesh to find

the little birds

made from the green

malachite of the Atlas.

You must have sat like this

over your mint tea thinking

about other years

at home, your mother

and her mother baking together

and cleaning the silver

with the special paste

that is one of the

remembered decorations;

you must have thought

I'd been gone a long time,

waiting as it got later,

as I wait now

for you, the same sounds

of the cars outside, passing by.

[from Seasonal Rights]

by Daniel Halpern from Selected Poems copyright (c) 1994

Sestinas, DFW, and Television

Okay, in addition to leafing through old Vogue magazines, and tearing out pretty pictures, I'm still deeply hooked on David Foster Wallace.  I'm reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays and arguments.  I love his writing, his voice, his idiosyncratic thinking, and his appalling critical clarity, especially about television.  In his essay E Unibus Pluram:  Television and U.S. Fiction, he refers (on p. 45) to a book of poetry by James Cummins called The Whole Truth, "a cycle of sestinas deconstructing Perry Mason." 

I first encountered the sestina form in college in Frank Bidart's poetry class, and have frequently used it as a palate cleansing exercise as I wade through the swampy quagmire of my novel.  There's something very orderly and tidy to me about the rigid formality of this form, and I can complete a decent draft in about 4 hours -- which feels so good after never ever ever never finishing my damn novel.  (Yet.)

Of course, when you look around on the internet, you're likely to find all kinds of things.  Here are some sestinas written for a contest, as well as a sestina group and forum.  No matter how quirky your taste (gotta real jones for those sestinas!?!), you're not alone in the internet universe.

And I found a page of sestinas on McSweeney's, which is another one of Dave Eggers' great things.

The irony of this whole essay for me is that I was raised in a television-free household, and have literally never seen a single episode of Perry Mason.  I've caught up on a lot of other t.v. in hotel rooms and at home on my own ginormous flat panel 50" screen, but not Bewitched or The Partridge Family or The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Lou Grant or any of a number of other genres and periods, including our current "reality" tv craze.  We don't have a television here in our house in Homer, and I think of all the people I know, myself included, who all always claim not to watch "much" tv.  Two entire solid months with no tv is a far cry from the 2-3 daily hours that folks who claim "not much" tv watching seem to watch.  More time to read David Foster Wallace.  Try it sometime.

Poem: White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down

out of the freezing sky

with its depths of light,

like an angel,

or a buddha with wings,

it was beautiful

and accurate,

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings –

five feet apart – and the grabbing

thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys

of the snow –

And then it rose, gracefully,

and flew back to the frozen marshes,

to lurk there,

like a little lighthouse,

in the blue shadows –

so I thought:

maybe death

isn’t darkness, after all,

but so much light

wrapping itself around us –

as soft as feathers –

that we are instantly weary

of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river

that is without the least dapple or shadow –

that is nothing but light – scalding, aortal light –

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones.

By Mary Oliver

From House of Light copyright © 1990, Beacon Press

A Real Live Author

Just when you think that maybe your mother (and The Bens (B) and (C)) are the only people who read your blog, Barry Eisler, the author of the John Rain thriller series, posted a comment on Brad's blog (which has 2,914 subscribers at this moment) saying

And Amy and Brad, thanks for your kind words about my books. Really glad you're enjoying them.  Cheers, Barry

How cool is that?  A real writer taking the time to connect with his readers..

Learning Joy from Dogs without Collars

I read this memoir last summer and ran across it on the shelves today while looking for Tobias Wolff books for Brad.  It's a fascinating story of the childhood of Lauralee Summer who grew up in poverty and homelessness and went to college at Harvard.  Ben Casnocha, I recommend that you read this book in your voluminous spare time as you think about college choices.  Pros and cons, food for thought. 

from p. 223

During the first week, we attended many orientation sessions about diversity.  At one of these gatherings, the speaker asked the audience of two hundred to raise their hands if they were from working-class backgrounds.  I looked over the heads of the mass of students and saw seven raised hands, one of which was my own.  Only seven out of two hundred Harvard students were from working-class families.  My mother and I were not even working class; we were welfare class.  During Freshman [sic] Week, I met many students whose parents owned companies, had millions of dollars, or were faculty at other elite universities.  It was a shock to learn that such people existed in my own world.

The Audre Lorde quote in my last post is from the epigraph from Chapter 28 of this book (p. 266).

A poem written by an anonymous homeless youth is the main epigraph:

we are not lost

we know where we are

but our itinerary is chance and weather

we do not believe in destinations

and we are in no hurry

we have learned patience

from statues in a thousand parks

and joy from dogs without collars.

Free Speech: Audre Lorde

We can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid...[I]n this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.  And it is never without fear -- of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment....But we have lived through all of those already, in silence....And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.  It is very good for establishing perspective --

from "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, Santa Cruz, CA:  Crossing Press, 1984