Mistakes

Just finished reading a fantastic book, "Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me," by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.  It's the kind of work that makes you think about hard things, in a good way. 

What stayed with me was how slavishly we work, as humans, to convince ourselves that what we want to see is indeed what we see. 

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most difficult distortions for us to let go of.  As Tavris and Aronson show through a series of convincing studies, we go to great lengths to bend our perceptions in accordance to our desires and our decisions.

I have been writing about the damage that this kind of thinking can do to the soul over time.

I love this line from their book: "The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self justification; but the soul wants to confess."

They also mention how few of us are willing to stand up and say "I made a big mistake."  That makes those who do all the more worth of admiration.  As the authors explain, "And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it is easier to repair that when it has become the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots." 

I want to plant new trees in my garden, ones that will grow long and good roots.

Watering

This summer is a dry one--I've been spending early mornings and late evenings watering,  thinking about water, and its growing scarcity. 

Last evening, I stood in my garden pouring water from a spout, a miracle in this late July. 

The air is heavy, uneasy and a child cries plaintively at the end of a long day; birds twitter and rush among the flush of late afternoon, the time when summer day melts into night.

I recall a churchyard in England where the flies buzzed, where I first attended a service called evensong.  I remember the minister preaching about time present and time past, let the evening come, he said.

The words seem strangely comforting to me during this summer of upheaval when my mother's lungs have filled with water and been drained, leaving her weak and tired.

She tells me she has spent the day washing old porcelains, as she wonders aloud where her spoons and forks should go--my children wash out paint brushes to make our new house a home--

I close my eyes in thanksgiving, whispering to myself, let the evening come.

An Untold Story

Anniversaries are powerful things.  Whether we wish to celebrate, observe, or ignore, we are deeply attuned to the lure of significant dates in all our lives.  Sometimes these dots on the calendar are very public events; on other occasions, they are more private matters.  No matter the circumstances, the human urge to document, to record, and in some senses to calibrate the rhythm of our internal seasons never ceases.  I am often surprised by what will trigger a memory for me--a slash of light on the mountains, a humid afternoon, a late evening phone call from another city.

What I am sensing in my writing life this summer is the peace that words can bring, the order that different combinations of the alphabet can provide to what would otherwise be an incomprehensible experience.

Recently, I came upon this line from Zora Neale Hurston: "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you." I am beginning to understand what I think she means.

"The Body as Storyteller"

Antonia Damasio writes, "We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them."

Every day now I am discovering what I used not to allow myself to see.  This revelation is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.  It is as though the blinders I wore for so long to survive have been lifted from my eyes.  What I see right in front of me, and what I can glimpse on the horizon, are allowing me to begin a life of authenticity that I used not to think possible. 

I am starting to feel everything keenly, both what is joyful and what is sorrowful, in what Damasio calls "the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day."

The Human Animal

In summer, for me at least, the natural world feels closer.  Today a rush of thunderstorms blew through our little town, mercifully breaking the heat.  I watched the rain lash against Tussey Ridge until again I had the sensation that I was living in the clouds.  Sometimes in the mornings the mist is low enough that I cannot separate cloud and sky in my mind's eye.

The plants were thirsty, they benefited from the moisture.  Plans were disrupted, lightening crossed the sky, and cars drove with their flashers on. Afterwords, I napped, remembering the peace that can come after such bluster.  I am more at peace than I have been for many years; in my writing I have been thinking about how we humans are not so different from the animals that surround us.  Our dog seeks shelter in the rain; the mice that inhabited our garage over the winter flee their abode; and in my new house I can feel again.  It is comforting to realize that I have followed the same passage that Dennis Ortman describes: "animals fight, freeze, or flee when threatened."--Dennis Ortman

Willfulness, in Fiction and in Life

Today I had tea with a new friend and her young son.  Seeing him climbing all over her, and watching her holding him close made me remember the oldest cliche in the book--how fast the time raising children goes.  With two kids about to head off to college, it is not so hard to remember those days of early risings, snack, and nap.  It is also amazing to realize how distinct and powerful a child's will can be even at the beginning.

In my latest fiction I am exploring the early formation of personality.  Erik Erikson sees the first stage of human growth as the choice between trust and mistrust, calling it "the cornerstone of a vital personality."  It was easy to see how much this young boy trusted his mother, and how primal that act must be.  Another one of my favorite novelists, Jhumpa Lahiri describes "writing stories" as "one of the most assertive things a person can do.  Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate attempt to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself.  During these hot summer days, I am translating my experience of the world onto the page, a freedom I am treasuring.

The New House

One of the themes of my year has been the deepening of many old and new friendships.  When she learned I had bought my new house, my best friend sent me the following beautiful quotation: "With the eyes to see it and the hands to create it, we can recover the home that the soul desires"--A. Lawlor

This morning, writing fiction in the sunshine at my new desk, I realized that for me, as for so many other writers, "Narrative imagination...[is] a basic evolutionary tool of survival"--Aleksandar Hemon.   Now that I have cleared off my desk, I can begin to recover the place of my dreams.

Both on the page and off, my world seems more brightly colored than it has in a long time.  At the Boalsburg farmer's market this afternoon, I bought two deep reddish purple hibiscus and a tiger orange and black daisy plant for the front garden.  The man who sold it to me said that, I needed to be patient; the hibiscus would not emerge until at least the middle of May.  So I should not call him in April and complain that it didn't make it through the winter.  He added, as I was leaving, that if I were lucky, the daisies might come back even though they are, technically speaking, only annuals. I am going to hold onto this metaphor.

The First Poem

I once listened to Seamus Heaney give a reading at Harvard on an October evening.  It was warm enough that all the tall windows of Emerson Hall were open. Once the fire marshall starting kicking people out, they went outside and hung onto the sills so they could still listen.  Something he said that night has stuck with me for many years.

He talked about the importance of finding a place to write; whenever he has moved, he has never felt at home until he has begun his first poem.  That was, he said, the sign of whether or not he would be comfortable in that place.  For him it was a ritual, a baptism of creativity.  This warm July morning, I woke up with the first lines of a new poem running through my mind.  I am grateful for my own independence.

"What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"

A friend of mine gave me this quotation from Charles Bukowski and it has led me to reflect upon this past year.  Today is the first day that I feel settled into my new life: new house with view over farmland all the way to Tussey Ridge; blue hydrangeas waiting to be planted; kids falling into summer routines; the ice cream truck coming down our street; my mom having survived several near-death experiences this spring; our dog lying beside me as I write these words. I feel grateful to everyone who has helped me get through the past twelve months.

It is time to start looking ahead: my first volume of poetry, "Cheap Grace," is in print, available both from www.finishinglinepress.com and amazon; my first novel, "Through Your Hands," is also available through amazon, both hard and soft cover.  I am planning to unpack my first study of my own tomorrow.  The walls are red, the writing desk and bookcase left for me by the previous owner.  I am excited to begin my new writing days.