I got my right leg adjusted to be 1/8 of an inch shorter this afternoon. All of a sudden, everything is feeling easier–and it’s shocking to me that I haven’t realized that for about six months that I was walking on a limb that was a wee bit too long.
But what an amazing difference. I feel so ready to take on the world tonite…one step at a time. :)
This seems the perfect poem to ruminate on as I’m headed out the door for a morning swim (especially that last stanza). There have been times in my life when swimming was the most important thing I could do–I’m thinking of the night after I learned that my father had terminal cancer. I swam 100 laps then, despite being 8 months pregnant. Swimming until I’d lost every ounce of strength left in me. Because I thought I could swim away the hurt and the reality of what was happening…
And one more thing: I’m looking for a local who’d like to do some ocean swimming with me. If you’re interested, drop me a line.
The Swimming Lesson
by Mary OliverFeeling the icy kick, the endless waves
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace,–
How to survive in any place.
I’ve begun various narratives about my trip to Europe and either deleted them or kept them in the drafts file. I’m finding it hard to write the whole story of that experience and what it meant to me. Having been burned a bit by storytelling–especially the impulse to create a tidy, pretty narrative out of something that’s complex or messy…it just isn’t working for me right now. While my trip wasn’t necessarily messy, it was complicated–I traveled with the intention of letting myself experience many things. I pushed my comfort zones. I traveled by saying YES and not letting fear stand in my way. I traveled to make new memories to replace some painful ones. And the trip was all of those things, as well as a wonderful way to mark my 40 years of life (happy birthday to me!). It was utterly unforgettable, and deserves all of the flowery adjectives and adverbs that I’d like to attach to my descriptions of it. But it was also a bit indigestible and my attempts to create a cohesive story of it have failed, or they just don’t say what I want them to–they don’t even come close to being as intense or as real as what I experienced as I traveled.
So I think I may have reached the limits of my storytelling capacity with this segment of my journey. Or perhaps…I’m learning that some things are simply better left unsaid?
Last week’s NYT essay by Tony Perrottet, “Why Writers Belong Behind Bars,” suggests that the best thing that ever happened to the Marquis de Sade’s writing career was his incarceration, because “it was only behind bars that Sade was able to knuckle-down and compose the imaginative works upon which his enduring, if peculiar, reputation lies.” Perrottet offers other examples of writers whose work blossomed from behind bars, too, and suggests that contemporary writers could also benefit from a bit of self-enforced isolation:
‘A prison is indeed one of the best workshops.’ Colette declared. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically. In the early 1900s, by her own account, her caddish fist husband had stashed her in a tiny room for four hours a day, refusing to let her out until she had finished a requisite number of pages–a dramatic measure, but one that resulted in a novel a year for six years. ‘What I chiefly learned was how to enjoy, between four walls, almost every secret flight,’ she later recalled, sounding almost sentimental.
I’ve found that the focused bursts of “sprint” writing help me to maintain my focus on the task at hand–in 20 minutes there’s no time for a wikipedia diversion. But since taking on more responsibility as a single parent, and having some of my job responsibilities increase, it’s been harder to carve out the time for writing, even in short bursts. I’ve found that when I travel, it’s a bit easier–such as writing from the parlor of a Cape Cod inn last year, or from the sanctuary of an old church this past spring. But I can’t travel all the time, and sometimes that doesn’t work as well as I’d like–there are still all kinds of distractions and it takes time to settle into a quiet place (and to find an outlet for one’s laptop. As a side note, I do think that if Woolf was writing about 21st-century scholars her requirements would not only include “A Room of One’s Own,” but also a steady power supply and a wireless connection…).
Thus, so far, I haven’t found the perfect recipe for a writing space. But it seems that the search for one is part of the process–every day I keep trying to find that perfect blend of productivity and genius, and in that process I continue to make slow (and steady) progress on my writing projects. On some level I would love it if someone ‘locked’ me away in a tower for awhile every day to force me to meet my writing goals…but of course that would chafe in other ways that would be counter-productive. Learning to discipline myself seems a more important, if elusive, goal.
Image above is of me (in my ivory tower office), holding the edits to a dissertation chapter.
West Wind #2
You are young.
So you know everything.
You leap into the boat and begin rowing.
But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment,
without any doubt,
I talk directly to your soul.
Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water,
let your arms rest,
and your heart,
and heart’s little intelligence,
and listen to me.There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.~ Mary Oliver ~
I went to the beach last week to chase the setting sun, but I was wearing my bionic leg so I couldn’t even dip in a toe to the water (for fear of shorting out my circuitry). Such an ache I felt to leave leg and clothes in a heap on the beach and just swim…
The Mary Oliver poem below, especially the first stanza, reminds me of the day a few years ago when I received the pathology pictures from the hospital where I had my cancer treatments–including the images of my amputated limb. It was tougher than I thought it would be to look at those images, and afterwards I went for a long swim. As I let the water support me I ‘felt’ my leg there with me, for the first time in a long while. It was a powerful moment to reconnect with something that I’d lost and mourned for so many years, my body truly re-membering itself as I moved through the water…
And this poem also reminds me of how I struggle against gravity, where every step can be a huge effort…and how I long for the ocean–knowing that at sea is where I feel more free and comfortable (and alive) than I ever do on land.
The Sea
by Mary OliverStroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself–fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh–my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,
vanished
like victory inside that
insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.
Question:
Is the game of Hot Lava a universal among kids? I was recently surprised to learn from someone raised in Europe that he knew this game, and everyone I’ve asked about it since seems to have grown up playing some variation of it.
In my family it meant jumping from bed to bed rather than letting your feet touch the carpet, because that was Hot Lava and would melt your feet off.
Did you play Hot Lava? If so, how, where & when?
Last night I noticed that my leg didn’t seem to be charging correctly–the microprocessor in my bionic knee needs to ‘charge’ every 30 hours or so, or it runs out of juice. The charging cable that I use for the knee has some simple LEDs that indicate whether it’s charging and how much juice is left in the battery. And last night one of those lights (the one that indicates whether it’s charging) didn’t seem to be working. But it was late, so I plugged it in and figured that the light was broken and all was ok.
But of course it wasn’t. When I donned my leg this morning I realized the battery was completely dead. Ugh.
I have a second charger cord, but it was already packed in one of the moving boxes, and I wasn’t sure which one. And, it seemed as though the problem might not be the charger but the leg itself. I started panicking a bit, thinking that I’d gotten some sand in the computery-parts when I went to the beach a few days ago. And I was already imagining that this uber-busy week was going to get a lot more crazy if I had to get a ‘loaner’ knee and send mine back to the plant for servicing.
But…after about 20 minutes I found the other charger and the microprocessor seems to be taking a charge just fine now (fingers crossed).
Sometimes I resent my reliance on technology–I don’t want to be so physically dependent on cords and batteries and computers. But I also fought for years to acquire this technology for myself, knowing that this type of knee would give me the mobility that I craved. Recently I read a Journal entry that I wrote just after I got my first bionic knee. I was traveling in Paris for the first time and found that navigating the uneven cobblestones was a breeze with the new knee, and I knew that if I had analog parts that I would have probably fallen repeatedly because of the uneven pavement. I felt so fortunate to have access to the technology that gave me mobility under those circumstances. And I still do, even if it means that my Monday needs a bit of a ‘re-boot.’
Lately I’ve noticed the most amazing floral smell every time I sit in the middle of my living room couch. I’d thought it was the cut flowers on my sidetable, but figured out that definitely was not the case (if anything they were a bit stinky), and then I thought it was the heliotrope blooming on my back porch, but the mystery smell was not really vanilla-y enough to be heliotrope.
Then today, while packing up some living room stuff, I figured it out. It was a broken bottle of shampoo from a hotel in Provence, that had leaked into my as-yet-unpacked suitcase from Europe. Oops!
(I suspect there’s some part of me that thinks that I can hold those Europe memories closer as long as my suitcase is still intact.)
From Joy Harjo:
a woman can’t survive
by her own breath
aloneshe must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night wind women
who will take her into
her own selflook at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky
I am the throat
of the sandia mountains
a flight wind woman
who burns
with every breath
she takes
A portion of your soul has been entwined with mine. A gentle kind of togetherness, while separate we stand. As two trees deeply rooted in separate plots of ground, while their topmost branches come together, forming a miracle of lace against the heavens. ~Janet Miles
I loved these vines that I came across at the Huntington today–two grapevine tendrils entertwined with each other…I was also more enchanted by the statuary than usual–I even got in trouble for getting too close to a few of them in my picture-taking zeal…