QUOTABLE

After a visit with a student the other day, I found myself thinking of this quote. What if the very things that seem to keep us from writing, were really meant as challenges to drive us to the pen? Okay, so writers are perverse. I'm going to survive this, and I'm going to write about it.

"The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point he is in business." -John Barrymore

Today My Heart

Today my heart is a tabby cat
curled under a bed.

Gray window, gray sky, gray
rain falling. One white bird --

wings shimmering
like a promise of light.

THE STORIES WE TELL

Maybe remembering isn't what matters.
Our minds let go of the details, or latch on
to the smallest of them. Was it ever
meant to make sense? Who remembers
which story we told ten years ago?
Ten minutes ago? Go ahead, measure it
in decades, in centuries. You told
your mother that story. You woke
from a dream of her, she put her hand
on your arm. Tell it again, she said.
You had a feeling then, like standing
on the beach and the sand
pulling out from under your feet.
A feeling the world existed in more
than one dimension. We tell the same stories,
all of us, over and over, like runners
covering the same track, or pianists
practicing the same song, the same chord,
the same old, same old scales -- Every Good Boy
Does Fine. And what you would give (years from now)
to hear her tell it one more time?


I just spent an hour revising and posting a poem that I posted last month -- nice concrete demonstration of how we tell the same stories, all of us, over and over. But at least you get a new picture.

Your Mythic Journey

Monday morning I found this quotation taped to my office door (thanks, Louise).

"When we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed from our isolation and loneliness. Strange as it may seem, self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don't know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart."

Valley-Fox in Your Mythic Journey

"My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes experience." Frank Conroy, Stop-Time

image from http://landscapearchiteck.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/franklin_trees_01.jpg

When/Feel/Need

She puts us into groups of three
and writes WHEN FEEL NEED
on the whiteboard. We're to practice saying
"when you...I feel...I need..." so the first of us
rehearses an upcoming conflict
with an ex-husband and another
a confrontation she expects to have
with her coworker, while I
try to rewrite a bad script played out
only last night with my daughter.
But it turns out all three of us in our small group
are moms and we talk about that
and what we really want to say
to our teenagers ends with I need you
to be small again so that I can buckle you
into your stroller and take a walk
to clear my head.

Morning Pages

Since December 29, I've gone back to writing morning pages, under the direction of writing guru Julie Cameron. Three pages every day. (And why does my notebook have such big pages, anyway?)

It's a habit I'd gotten away from, with the excuse that my daughters don't go to bed early any more, and neither do I, making it harder to get up early and write. But somehow, the morning pages habit is carrying me along -- I'm stunned by how freeing this is and how much I have to say. Why did I ever stop?