Poetry
Here’s Mary Oliver’s “I Want to Write Something So Simply.”
Journeying
I’ve never been much of a writer, in the sense that I haven’t written much down until very recently. As a child I managed a few entries in my pink Holly Hobby diary with its metal latches. As a teenager, I thought journal keeping ought to be a part of my adolescent persona, so I wrote in one sporadically. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in English Literature, so I’ve read a good chunk of the Western Canon and written innumerable papers threading theories through texts. I’ve always been a gluttonous reader. But consistent writing of my own choosing, no.
This does not mean that I did not want to write. I did, even though many years passed before I could let that desire become a sentence in my brain, let alone one on a page. When my children were very young, we lived in Indiana. I met a woman at our church, who wrote stories. We talked about writing. She encouraged me, as I stood in her kitchen bouncing one of my babies, to write something down. I tried. I wrote fragments, pieces of thoughts. The process was excruciating. I could scarcely bear to see my words on a page. I winced, I felt choked.
A couple of years later, we moved to St. Louis, and I began to read a lot of mysteries - a person commits a crime, there is a puzzle, they get caught - very satisfying. I thought about writing a mystery novel. Mine would begin with a young woman, sitting on the front porch of her home in the early morning, drinking a cup of coffee. The steam would rise from the mug as it rose off the fields around her, changing state. But I couldn’t get any further. During our time in St. Louis, I was chronically ill from allergies. I kept a gratitude list to tether me to the world, to life with my children and partner, my home. The list contained items you would expect to find like the sunrise, a child’s smile, the abundant cherry tomato plant in the backyard. But it also included, “exhaustion,” “depression,” “R’s screaming fits.” In my usual all or nothing approach to life, I recorded the suffering as well. Was I grateful for “feeling like I have the flu”? No, but the act of recording it, seeing it on paper, reminded me, “I am here, I am here, I am here.”
We moved several more times, my children grew, I read, words ran rampant in my brain, tumbling over themselves, organizing into phrases and paragraphs, clamoring to be spoken, written. In 2018, we moved to Omaha, and later that year, I took a trip to Iona, a mile long island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. I went via plane, train, bus, and two ferries for an interspiritual retreat, which included art making and poetry. I attended all of the poetry workshops, and found that the form gave me a backdoor through which to slide my words onto the page. I didn’t wince, I didn’t immediately want to burn the paper containing my poem. On the train headed home after the retreat, I wrote and wrote and wrote about my experience, my words.
I came home and started another round of therapy focused on my mother; I kept writing poems. My work around, and eventually with, my mom reached its painful crescendo. I broke off my relationship with her and waited to see what I would find in its rubble. I found myself, and that self had a voice. Eighteen or so months ago, lying on my couch perusing a newsletter written by a knitter I enjoy watching on YouTube, I thought, “I could write a newsletter.” So I downloaded the Substack app and started writing. I don’t feel choked anymore. I don’t want to hide from my words. They are a joy. I have always loved words, and now, some of them are mine - they exist as I do.
In the last year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote a paper on Zora Neale Hurston’s luminous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I remember writing the conclusion. I loved writing conclusions because I could bring together all the facets of my essay, and finally, weave them into a whole. I felt light, hollowed out, and yet incredibly present as I finished the last few lines of the assignment. I quoted Hurston as her protagonist, Janie, “pull[s] in her horizon . . . pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder.” As I wrote, I saw Janie draw in her garment made of sky. I felt her act. Thirty years later, I am the one doing the pulling; I recognize my own “life” in the “meshes” of Janie’s horizon. I see words draped around my shoulders, and I call my “soul to come and see.”
What is integral to you, to who you are? Does it have a story? What’s its history? Are there parts of yourself that you’d like to bring out of the shadows, express more fully?
Gardening and Making/Mending
We have to run a botanical gauntlet if we want to get from the front door to the car. The plants along the front porch are tall, and they reach out from beneath the house’s shade toward the sun as it rises over the back of the house in its transit west each day. The insects fawn over them, particularly bumblebees with their heavy bodies, making the plants droop over and around us as we pass gingerly by. Everything continues to grow, leggy, long, brownish. The zinnias have succumb to mildew but bloom anyway, the bright, full blossoms incongruous on powdery stalks. Eventually, a freeze will come and take nearly everything, but right now, the garden is liminal.
I’ve been thinking about book-binding, not doing it, just pondering it. Sometimes I enjoy the pondering more than the actual doing (although that does not extend to writing). I made this journal a few years ago out of scrap fabric and gifted trim. The binding is sewn in a particular fashion (Coptic!), and I found pulling the heavy waxed thread through the different layers of paper very satisfying. I felt obligated to use the journal, since I’d made it, so it does contain some notes from a few retreats I took during the pandemic. The paper is watercolor and has a lovely nobbly (knobbly?) feel - perhaps, I will use it again, or at least think about it.
Dearest Emily... it is a blessing to read your story! I am so grateful that you have found your voice and that you share your beautiful gift of writing from your heart...
This is lovely!