beautiful distance.

I practiced freewriting tonight with my eyes closed. It was wild. I did it on the computer so that I could let my fingers find the keys in the void. It took them a moment to remember, like eyes adjusting to the dark. The whole time I kept thinking, This is wild. This is really wild.

Not seeing the words as they came out of me created a beautiful distance. Freedom. Every word was pitched into the black canyon where even I couldn’t find them (unless I opened my eyes). There was no echo.

I’ve been reading Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. It’s wild, too. It’s so good. What else can I say? At one point, she describes her habit of writing sentences on top of each other. Over the space of a line or two in your notebook, you can write hundreds of sentences. The words become indecipherable, just a tangle of lines and splotches. There’s no getting those sentences back.

Writing is vulnerable. Self-expression is terrifying. Not everything you need to say or write needs to be heard or read.

list of things.

All weekend I’ve been trying to make a list of things I love to do. It shouldn’t be this hard, should it? It seems like the things I love to do and the things I should love to do get mixed up. And there are things that I don’t love to do in the moment, but once I’ve done them, I’m glad.

Maybe some of it boils down to fear?

Par for the course. I didn’t know what that saying meant until just a few years ago. Crazy, right? I asked someone, and he told me. It has to do with golf.

To make the list a bit more tangible, to coax it out, I decided to make it a list of things I love to do in the fall. 

Seven Fall Things I Love to Do

1. Walk down a street full of fallen leaves
2. Drink a cup of tea in the evening with a book
3. Eat a bowl of soup for dinner
4. Roast a winter squash
5. Wear tights and boots
6. Sit on a park bench and write in my notebook
7. Walk to work and listen to a good podcast

I am very guilty of filling my day with things-to-do. But it’s good to have blocks of time that aren’t meant to accomplish anything in particular. Time that you can fill with your existence. That can be enough.

right.

I’m standing in the kitchen - half in tree pose, if you must know. My computer is perched at the corner of our tiny, wobbly butcher’s block island. Jacob was held up in a meeting, so I’m holding up dinner.

It’s not the right kind of moment to write. My brain is still full of work, even though I’ve been home for two hours. The dinner is half cooked, so I’m keeping one eye, just the corner of it, on the stove. I feel harried, rushed, unsettled.

But I am here, charging in like a wild bull, no matter what lies ahead and no matter what kind of mess I make getting there.

About a month ago, I read an entire book in an evening. It was The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. I’ve read it before and I already know I love it. But I was getting ready to loan it to a friend, and that evening, as I cracked open the first page just-because I had such an overwhelming urge to read it, straight through, that I did it. I stayed up until 2am in the morning, letting my heart break with all the loss and life and forgiveness and Cape Cod found in those pages. Read it, please.

briefly.

It has been raining for days here. Sometimes the rain gives me melancholy, but not in an uncomfortable way. Rainy days make for an honest reckoning. They are the right time to search for the sadness of the world and to find your piece of hope, whatever that might be.

I am at a loss.
I am inside my own head.
I am distracted.
I am exhausted.

Lists are a good place to start. Try starting. That’s always the right idea.

On gray days (or nights, as it were), I listen to this song and this song. They sound just right with rain falling against the windows.

here we are.

It is easy to let fear build you a cage and it is easy to think that the bars of that cage are real. They are not. This year, I choose to live without fear.

1-strength train regularly
2-read at least one book in a day (a marathon reading session)
3-start buying ethically made investment clothing
4-become informed on the production of chocolate and coffee
5-watch one documentary each month
6-blog regularly (and define what that means for me) (like I do every year)
7-knit a sweater (just do it!)
8-take a spin class
9-stop nitpicking, nagging, and expecting perfection from others
10-cut back on TV
11-go on urban hikes
12-run a half marathon
13-send birthday cards
14-write some fiction
15-make handmade gifts
16-go to book readings and other literary events in my city
17-call people more often
18-make one writer friend
19-go camping in Shenandoah National Park
20-submit one essay somewhere anywhere
21-re-conquer my fear of city biking (on my new bike)
22-learn to use our fancy camera and start taking pictures
23-buy more local produce via the farmer’s market or a CSA
24-use less plastic (especially: produce bags, ziploc bags, and saran wrap)
25-practice positive self-talk
26-eliminate most/all bad chemicals that I put on my body
27-take a real vacation/trip somewhere with Jake (other than visiting family)
28-put compassion and love into the world

the ugly fish.

get to the bottom of it.

The universe rolls along and smacks me upside the head when I refuse to learn the lessons or heed the reminders that it has in store for me.

I hear my voice in other people’s voices.

Keep going and get to the bottom of it.

I read other blogs or essays, other things that have been written, and often find myself thinking, That’s what I want to write like. That’s my real voice. I’ve had enough of the dismal, dreary, drizzly rain writing that comes out of me. Enough of the gray day ennui and oh-my-god too much introspection for my own good. I want to be the voice of that goofy person. Or that passionate person. Or that confident person.

Do you know what I mean? I want my writing to be true in the sense that it is truly me. And here’s where the trouble brews, I think. I am so much not one voice. Not only am I changeable, but I find myself molding into the shape of others around me. There is such a very small number of people in this world with whom I am the first me, the unfiltered-as-I-am me. I keep that true self close and somewhat locked up.

The reality of being a human being, someone self-aware and awake to life, is that the stereotypes and neat descriptions don’t mean much. We are each a living contradiction wrapped up in a body and mind and feelings.

oh, the times.

Don't think about it. Don't think about how little time you may have, or how much. Stop measuring it out, line by line, step by step, task by task, soon year by year.

I haven't written in a long time.

It seems like there aren't enough minutes in the day, but of course it isn't true. There were minutes yesterday. There are minutes today. There will even be some tomorrow.

I will be brief, to prove this to myself - it doesn't have to be measured and thought out. It doesn't have to be deliberate. I can write a flash, a few words, but it still fills the space somehow. Slow drops in the deep bucket.

This moment is here: spooning a cold mango smoothie out of the food processor bowl, slow pats on my sleeping kitten's belly, and words. They're in my head. You don't understand how they're in my head. They are clawing and heaving and crazy-eyed.

I said I'd be brief and I will. The last stretch home down a skinny one-way street. I never walk down it. I remembered there was a magnolia tree there and I wanted to see if there were a few heavy blooms still hanging. There weren't, but beside the magnolia was this wild pink tree. I was grateful.

0

the way of things.

It has been a wide-and-round one month since I last wrote here. Technically one month and two days. When I looked at the calendar, suddenly I was struck with the realization that if I don’t get these fingers a-typing, May will have slipped by completely. Since I began this blog, I have ridden the tides of much and little to say, but I haven’t yet let an entire month pass in silence. It was a close call this time.

My world is saturated in the emotion of the day. Everyone experiences this saturation, I think. On a bad day, everything is a little grim. On a good day, everyone seems a little generous. It is only the color of our perspective that changes. Regardless, when my eyes gloss over with overwhelming and fearful things in life, when the way of things is suddenly changed, when I am squinting down an unfamiliar path and no one is telling me what to do next, well - those times the world shrinks small and there seems to be nothing to say.

I was driving across town late last night to pick Jacob up after rehearsal, driving to a part of the city I rarely go, and I debated which route would be fastest. I settled on Florida Ave. It was late, as I said, and I was tired, and the streets just seemed to be brimming with drunk people, stumbling in the street, and vacant faces, and certainly people who wanted to harm me. In short, the world seemed cold and dark and I wished I wasn’t out in it. When I found Jacob waiting on the corner, he climbed into the car and I burst out with, Sometimes I just hate living in the city!

a sloppy hand.

I have never known if I am ambitious enough to be an artist. Actually, I don’t know what artist means in the context of my life. I am less interested in giving myself over to an art form. I am more interested in giving myself over to life and letting the art-making-process permeate my life.

This is the reason that sometimes I struggle to say, I am a writer. I feel a little more comfortable with, I am a person who writes. The distinctions and minutiae that make sense in my head usually exist only in my head. I need someone to break the spell.

A side-effect of writing less is that everything seems less legitimate and less interesting. If I don’t write much, it seems like I probably don’t have claims to write anything. Writing regularly doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better, it just means you have dulled the nerves that cringe at the ego-centrism of writing. These may be cringing nerves that are mine alone, because I’ve never really liked much attention.

Coasting is easier, it is always easier. It is a good way to lose yourself and to lose the things that anchor you to life, your life, the life that is and will always be yours alone. The one.

In every part of my life, I order things. I tidy up. I make lists. But sometimes I want to write with a sloppy hand. I don’t care very much if it makes sense. This is a practice in...in what? In release of control. In feeling the wildness of the world under my skin. It is a break from myself and my own instincts. Perhaps it doesn’t make for an interesting read. But maybe you know the feeling?

bright shining.

Most of the time I spend writing, I am trying to capture some beauty or hope that I’ve felt, something in a fleeting moment that I want desperately to share. I don’t know if I can even go so far as to call these feelings - they’re something a bit deeper and more instinctive.

It’s all wild and wrapped up in how the bright sun is shining in the alley - the white light and the red bricks and the blue sky.

I just love this blog so much. This lady has got a head like mine. Food is all woven into her observations on life. But most importantly, I don’t know how, but she captures that grain of a moment - the one that is filled up with beauty and longing and hopeful feathers. It’s a clarity of mind, of observation, of reflection. Whatever it is, it sings inside of me. This post reminded me.

Jacob told me the other night that he had been thinking about how important it is for a creative person to have someone behind them. When the work of a creative person lives so much in the head, it’s invaluable to have someone who loves you unconditionally and really believes in you. It’s powerful to have someone believe that you’re capable of making great art. It is one thing to talk all abstract about what it means to be an artist. It is another to really figure out what it means - what it means in life, real life, the life where you pay bills and eat food and forge relationships.

notice.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem slowly. To be honest, I’ve been reading it since last summer. It’s not that I don’t like it, but when you have a large stack of books you’re reading, you have to pick one at a time. This one kept slipping to the bottom of the pile. I’m embarrassed because I feel that I'm exactly the sort of person who's supposed to be very well read in Joan Didion and I should love her.

At any rate, I’m in the last pages now. It turns out this collection makes good bus reading, i.e. I can read it in 10-15 minute chunks without feeling uncomfortable. Also, I’ve been reading it much more quickly since I got to her essay, On Keeping a Notebook. I got excited because she describes what I’ve always felt was a weird habit of mine: I observe things, remember an alarming number of details, and write them down. I don’t know why or for what. I write down pieces of conversation I hear on the bus. I write down that I saw an old man slowly get off his bike yesterday and push it across the street. I write down the color of the pavement outside the window of my office and how the color changes with the rain.

From time to time I think that these pieces will all come together someday into a story? an essay? a poem? But the truth is, they’ll probably just live on indefinitely in my retired notebooks. Didion says that this practice is important not for remembering details, but for remembering who you were when you observed the details. I dig that. My contribution is that I think it’s important because it makes observation a practice. In a world full of distraction and masses of faces glued to phones (soapbox?) it’s useful to remember how much you can hear and see just by looking up and looking around.

people.

I told you awhile ago about how much I love sharing. It always feels so special to me to know that someone else has thought of me. Likewise, it makes me happy to let others know that I thought of them.

I keep lots of files in Evernote of things to watch, things to read, things to listen to. When someone shares something with me, I quickly file it away until I have time to go back and really look at it. So the case with The Underground New York Public Library. My dad forwarded me the link months ago - last summer, I think. I filed it away and somehow it slipped to the bottom of the pile. I was clearing through some of the files last night and found it.

I'm just blown away - it's an incredible visual blog filled with candid pictures of people who are reading on the subway. I couldn't stop looking at it last night.

Here's what I think: people have interesting lives. Every single person. Rich or poor, happy or sad, connected or lonely. There's always something beneath the surface. There's always some history that you don't know. There's always an experience that tells a story.

I love people watching because I crave their stories. We all have stories - that's one thing we have in common.

I've been having a hard time writing lately. Can I make an honest confession? I've been watching TV for an hour most nights. I don't know how I slipped into it, but I've become very aware of the almost drug-like feeling induced by gluing your eyeballs to the screen. It's such an easy way to shut your brain down, especially if you can convince yourself that you deserve it because you've been working hard all day (this is what I convince myself). Well, I'm saying it out loud because I would like it to not become a habit.

let it go.

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” -Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I think I may have given you this quote before, but I needed to hear it again, today. This is one of the writing proverbs I keep in my head, along with others. These proverbs guide me on and help me to get over myself. I needed to hear it because I do it all the time. I imagine there are a handful of things that I will write that revolve around certain topics and once they're written, then they'll be done, dead, lost and I will be cleaned out. In those moments, I remember Annie Dillard’s words. I also say something to myself along the lines of, If this brain can write one good thing, it can write another.

I have been on a journey of discovery for...oh, for years. Self-discovery. Along with self-discovery, you discover the nuances of life that you may not have known. I don’t know what I mean, really, but you might. What I mean is that it feels exciting to be alive.

Jacob says that sometimes the appeal of my writing lies in its ambiguity and vagueness. I always assume that the opposite is true - I find this the least interesting part of my writing. Regardless, it’s the sort of writing that floods out of me without any effort or inhibition. It’s how my brain talks to itself inside my head.

be transparent.

The best thing in this world is to be known. People can only know you if you let them. It isn't easy, but it is worth it.

yesterday.

Things are going well in my part of the world. There’s lots of happiness and goodness and inspiration in my life. Sometimes life can be dreary and bleak, for everyone, so when it feels otherwise, I think it’s worth saying out loud.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but my favorite blog in the entire world is this one. It isn’t a fancy graphics, lots of pictures and cool design blog. It’s just writing about life and food and I adore it. I take it she’s been in the trenches with other writing projects, because there haven’t been any posts almost since Christmas. But a new post went up today and here’s what I remembered: I am a writer.

Her words give me a sense of connection and joie de vivre that immediately inspires me to live bigger, to cook, to do things I love, and to write. I read the posts like I’m starved and devouring a meal. I literally feel brain/emotion-hungry for writing like that. And of course, the real test: every time I read one of her posts, I immediately wish that I had written it myself. That's how you really know what you're meant to do.

Yesterday, Jacob and I celebrated the fact that two years ago, we went on a date for coffee at the Chocolate Sparrow and it stuck. (We sat at that table right at the bottom of the screen!) We celebrated by eating nachos in a loud bar, half watching the State of the Union and musing over why Joe Biden always looks like he’s thinking hell, yeah! in his head. We talked about where we would be sitting two years from now and how we never expected to be here.

details.

There are many things I love about living in a city - shopping is not one of them. There is no such thing as a quiet store in a city. Apparently everyone is always shopping, because stores are always packed full. For this reason, a trip to Target is a real endeavor for me. I try to get there as early as possible, literally as the doors open. I make out my list in order of where things are so that I can get in and out (yes, he would say that). I know some people love shopping and dawdling and wandering through the store - me, I hate it.

When I'm in a Sunday afternoon-packed Target, trying to wield a cart filled with toilet paper and laundry detergent, I become blind with rage. I lose my ordinarily magnanimous love of humanity, my understanding that everyone is just trying to get by. Before my eyes, everyone becomes evil and everyone is trying to trap me behind their carts and wild children and NO ONE WILL GET OUT OF MY WAY. I also often make the mistake of being a little hungry or a little dehydrated when I’m shopping. This very quickly turns into dehydrated hanger - the worst kind. Literally the only time I ever buy beef jerky is at Target. I don’t know. I’m hungry and confused with rage and there’s always beef jerky at the checkout. Why?

I’m happy to report that I braved Target this weekend, and hopefully this trip’s supplies will last for several months. If you’re ever at my apartment and wonder why two people should have approximately 100 rolls of toilet paper stored in their bathroom, it’s because I don’t want to go back to Target.

I sat down to tell you something lovely and inspirational about my weekend. I organized our bookshelf and did the thing where I sit surrounded by stacks of books, feeling very nerdy and happy. I saw some fun little plays (one of which Jake directed!). I went for a run (oh glory, my knee is on the mend). I hung a bulletin board over my desk and I framed some prints of Wellfleet. I baked a loaf of bread and roasted a spaghetti squash. I discovered this blog and read every post. But somehow...

feel things.

There is so much freedom in letting yourself feel. My emotions can be overwhelming at times, so my instinct is often to suppress them. When my eyes are prickling with tears, I swallow the lump again and again. When I'm filled to the tip-top with excitement and passion, I speak softly - I even whisper. I am dismissive of deep happiness and deep sadness because they shake me and make me feel vulnerable.

Somewhere in the last few years, something made me realize that the beauty of true experience, of awareness and presence, is worth it. I commit myself to bearing witness to the details of life.

Last year, I was lucky enough to work with the founder of YouthBuild, Dorothy Stoneman. She is a force to be reckoned with, a tornado of passion and belief in the future of young people. Someone asked her last year how she dealt with all the negative experiences and emotions she must encounter. You can't be a revolutionary without facing the suffering and wrong in the world. Her answer, her tool for coping, was this: I try to cry at least an hour a week, and sometimes, when things get rough it has to be an hour a day.

I will never forget that piece of wisdom. The way through the challenge of life is not to numb yourself, but to let yourself truly feel the grief and sorrow, right along with the happiness and joy. That's not an easy lesson to learn.

Yesterday I felt sad, so I sat on my couch and cried. I couldn't work up an appetite, so I ate cereal for dinner. I wrote wild and dark in my notebook, and doodled for a whole page instead of putting down words.

Today, I feel hope, so I'm blasting this mix over the sounds of my washer and dryer (my god they're loud) and letting the cacophony swim in my head. I am letting myself feel gratitude and letting myself dance around my kitchen while holding my bowl of pasta coated in this artichoke tapenade.

enough time.

I meant to write yesterday so that I could claim one more post for January, but time and distraction got the best of me. Instead, I ate two bowls of Fruity Pebbles (truth), watched some TV, and then curled up with my notebook and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.

I love some books fiercely, and Writing Down the Bones is one of them. I know I’ve gone on and on about it, so I won’t do it again. I have read this book so many times, but it never wears out on me. There is some magic in it. I always know when it’s time to read it again. And somehow I always find exactly what I need to hear. For example:

"...don't tell us about anger (or any of those big words like honesty, truth, hate, love, sorrow, life, justice, etc.); show us what made you angry. We will read it and feel angry. Don't tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken in them."

When I was 17, I picked up a book at a used bookstore: A New Lifetime Reading Plan. Maybe you’ve read it? I don’t have it anymore; I must have lost track of it on one of my moves. There wasn’t anything too magical about it anyway, but I still remember the moment when I sat down on my bed holding that book and felt this rush: there was so much to read, so much wonder and creativity in the world, and there wasn’t any time to waste. I had always loved reading, but that’s the first time I remember feeling all-consuming awe. I suddenly felt a responsibility to honor this incredible tradition: the written word. That’s the first time I felt that my life couldn’t possibly be long enough to read everything I wanted to.

Even still, though there will never be enough time, I will never give up the pleasure of re-reading certain books. It is the comfort of warmth on a cold night, the joy of food when you’re hungry, the safety in unconditional love. It fills a very deep need.

define.

I have always been the changeable one. Whether in friendships or in love, I have been the one quickest to shape my thoughts, opinions and personality to fit those around me. I want to fit in. I want to avoid conflict. I want to be what I imagine others must want.

It’s strange to say that out loud. I admit, it’s not one of my proudest character traits.

One of the great challenges, I believe, of my adult life has been to learn how to be myself. To learn how to form an opinion and hold it as my own. To learn how I would like myself to be defined, as a person, and how I would like to tell my own story.

You know that we’re all telling our own stories, right? We’re telling them to ourselves. Which bits will you remember and which will you forget? What will be the mood cast on those memories? Who will be the good guys and who will be the bad guys? It’s one great long story-telling venture, from one end of your life to the other.

Things happen. And then we tell them in a story. And that is our life.

Things happen that you can’t control. But many many many things happen that you can control. That’s your ammo. That’s your story-crafting material.

I ate popcorn for dinner. I tried to watch the newest Downton Abbey, but my internet was too slow. And I told myself to sit down and write you (lovely reader) a mess of crap because writing a mess of crap is better than writing nothing at all. There’s no wisdom today, and really no point (which I believe is breaking a great cardinal rule of blogging). This is what comes of having nothing to say.* I am forced to dredge deep. So I dredged up my slowly growing ability to define myself as a person, independent of what others may want or expect. I also dredged up my story, which made me think of yours. You better dredge it up too.

*For the record, this is what beat out my attempt to write about a glass of water...sitting at the edge of the table...with tiny bubbles. Here we are, being real.

old words.

I am wild with the need to write. Wild with it. I love it.

I was looking over this blog today and my eyes landed on the Twitter feed on the right. I have fallen out of that Twitter habit, which is ok for now. I might pick it back up in the next months, but for now it’s ok. One life lesson I’ve learned: don’t try to form or break too many habits at the same time. Being overwhelmed is the surest way to abandon your goals. At any rate, I hadn’t realized before that Twitter lists those tweets by how many days old they are. The most recent one is 134 days ripe. What?

I realize that, in other words, that is a few months. But there’s something about seeing the number of days that makes it feel an epic long while ago. And so, seeing those 134-days old words made me think of T.S. Eliot.

For I have known them all already, known them all --
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
- The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

A dear friend sent me a link to this post yesterday. I zeroed right in on the end, which contains the thought I will carry with me for the next many days:

"There is literally no reason not to write. Nothing bad can come of it. Even if no one reads what you are writing, you have a chronicle of something. You are creating something. I’m not the first to say it, but the act of creating almost always leads you somewhere you never would have gone otherwise, and makes you see things differently. How is that ever bad? The luckiest among us might even get nice notes from readers saying how much what we’ve written has inspired them. I’m telling you, if you are coming from a real place, there’s no question that will happen.” - Jenny Rosenstrach (of Dinner: A Love Story)

august: remembering.

I label my writing by day, nothing else, never titles. So I have files and files full of unidentified writing. Some of it I remember vividly, the exact moment and emotion that triggered the words. Some of it I don’t remember at all. Those are my favorite - forgetting severs my emotional, possessive attachments and I can read with clean eyes. It's an incredible thing, to read something you know you wrote, but you can't remember writing it. At any rate, while digging through this mess today, I found what follows below. Technically I didn’t write it today...but I decided to share it today, so that counts.

15aug2012.
I’ve grown tired of running in the neighborhood we’re in right now, temporarily, for a few more weeks. It feels like any direction I run, there are hills at every inconvenient moment. At the moment when I need a flat stretch to keep going and find my second wind, there is a hill. So my lungs start to burn and my head spins and I slow to walk over the crest.

So last night, as the light was falling earlier still, we drove up the road to a man-made lake with a paved path around it. The path is flat and weaves in and out of cool low brush and stubby trees that smell of damp moss and wet dogs. The lake, I have heard, was made when they extended the Metro line out further into Maryland. I have heard that, for some time, this lake was just marked by a sign: Lake Metro. Now it has the name of a person.

food.

I don’t write about food much here (really, ever). Strange, because I think about food, more or less, every waking moment. I love to cook, eat, and feed others. I love the creativity that comes with opening a refrigerator and asking, What can I make out of all this? I just love food.

There’s this desire that I believe comes with any creative urge to make something new. We all want to contribute our own thing. I don't think I’m alone in my instinctive need to make something original and unique, something that would make everyone say, Ah, we never thought of that!

But anyway, it’s bound to be an unrequited desire. It’s all been said and it’s all been done. I am slowly learning this lesson: it is less about original and unique, more about the truest expression of myself and my lens on the world. Authenticity - that is the business of this artist.

I love reading food blogs, but I would never never never dream of trying to write one. There are so many. There are millions. Everyone wants to write about food and take pictures of what they eat and pictures of what they make and pictures at restaurants and put the pictures on Instagram and on their blogs and...so on. I enjoy my share of food blogs, but it just seems too awfully popular to be writing one. That sounds very hipster of me, but even so, my reaction to a glut of food blogs is that I never write about food.

the ride.

Since mid-September I have been gloriously free of public transportation. For several months I commuted via a lovely one mile walk. These days, a zippy bike ride. But this morning, it was raining hard and I needed to wear something nice. I also needed my hair to not be a hot-frizzy-helmet-mess. So I took the bus.

I love the freedom of using my own legs to get wherever I need to go. I also love exercise that has a purpose, i.e. getting me to work. But this morning I remembered with a rush the infinite wealth that lies on one short bus ride, the ammo, the people. There’s so much to see and listen to and speculate about and imagine. I don’t particularly enjoy riding the bus, but it still fires up my writer/thinker brain.

The bus cleared out at the stop where I got on, so I sat in the front, next to a large man with a tall umbrella and a heavy head of fuzzy black hair. It had been raining, and in the moments his umbrella was closed, before he got on the bus, a dozen tiny drops caught in the net of his hair, like drops of dew on a morning spiderweb. He let me get on the bus first. He heaved and sighed until I got off. He looked up at the ceiling and out the window behind him and he just sighed these deep, anxious sighs.

When I reached my stop and the bus halted with a bump, he held out his arm, straight across the aisle, like a rail, offering it to the woman behind me, something to hold onto. People are always falling all over each other on the bus, and pretending that it's perfectly normal to stumble and cram oneself against strangers. She didn’t take his arm.

goal: inspiration space.

• Listening to this album.
• Eating this food.
• And writing in this inspiration space:

small life.

It’s lovely when the itch to write comes back to me. I just need to dust it off and shake it out and it finally takes me away. It’s worth reminding oneself that inspiration can only carry you off if you show up.

I have been successful at freewriting all days but one this week. Last night, I did absolutely everything else on my to do list first. I even added more things to my to do list, and did those as well. It was approaching 10:30pm and I was thinking about what book I wanted to read and how cozy my bed was looking and by some other power, I managed to get my notebook in my hand, set a timer for 10 minutes, and sit myself on the couch to write. I began by writing I don’t want to write but still...I’m showing up. My calendar on the wall is looking very happy with a few big black Xs on it.

Many years ago, a friend introduced me to Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow and my life was changed. It opened my eyes to myself and to human truths I had found no words for, which I believe to be the greatest feats of good art. I will never, never forget those moments, curled up in the Wellfleet winter, reading that book for the first time.

Today I uncovered this wonderful piece about Mr. Berry’s annual birding walk (I was pointed there by this excellent blog). The author, Erik Reece, kindly offered these words:

In tumultuous and uncertain times, it is worth being reminded that these fine things—beauty, faith, gratitude—still lurk eternally beneath history’s dark veneer, and that an artist working alone in a room beside a river may catch a glimpse of them and render them into a lyric poem, a short story, or an essay. 

brooding.

I had a professor in college who was a little wacky. She was the march-to-your-own-drummer sort of English teacher that no one openly admitted to liking. She asked for brazenness and silly self-expression that made me, at least on the face of it, hate her classes. But there was always that little high I got from whatever ridiculous thing she made us write or read or do. And not shockingly, there are things she taught me that sort of bubble up in my consciousness when I least expect it.

So.

I wrote something for one of her classes, I don’t remember what anymore, and she gave me one line of feedback on it. Stop writing so passively. She was absolutely right and still is.

This roared up in my brain last night after Jacob described my writing voice as detached and passive. It wasn’t a criticism, and sometimes passive and detached is exactly how I mean to write. But I really do write passively....all the time. Whether I mean to or not.

In one sense it’s nothing more than a grammatical choice. But in another, it is a subtle way to say things with less conviction, sharpness, passion and ownership. I literally tend toward writing in the passive rather than active voice. I use turns of phrase like seems and might be and appears and so on. It’s less vulnerable and frankly easier to write with less authenticity and self.

I’ve been reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and it really has gotten my wheels spinning. It’s ushered in the epiphany that things I once considered my flaws might be the very opposite. She describes the powerful, heart-thumping empathy I have felt my entire life. She describes the intense dreams and consuming emotions, both good and bad, that might overtake a highly sensitive and introverted person. She mentions such people tend to avoid violent movies - which I absolutely do. She even describes the case of a child who would cry when other children got into trouble in class. Me, I blush when I can tell other people are feeling embarrassed.

success.

I can’t seem to settle on anything. When I write little bits, and delete, and write, and delete, and think, and think, etc. I tend to get lost at sea. The task (writing) seems to grow larger and larger and the importance more and more grave. Suddenly I find myself here, making lists about what kind of blog this is and imagining how I might totally change or totally scrap the whole thing. At least I usually recognize and reign in my crazylady brain when it comes around. Well, I try to.

I desperately want to classify the whole thing and give it some order. Much in the same way that I want to line up the deodorant and hand lotion and mouthwash into a neat row on the shelf. It’s a ridiculous thing. The world moves along just fine if my toiletries are in disorder and I can write big and unwieldy even without a schedule or tidy purpose.

I re-read the first post I wrote here to remind myself: the point is to write. It doesn’t have to be all bloggy and beautiful and attract one million readers. I don’t need to write features on a particular schedule about particular things. Some people do, but right now, I do not. The point for me is to write. I write about things I notice, things I think about, things I read or eat or listen to. That’s all.

For just over a month, I have been biking to work. It’s been a wild adventure. I’ve never biked so much in my life. In the deep dead of winter, it’s cold and it seems many, many cars want to run me over.

It was cold this morning - not too cold, but cold enough that my eyes stung and I shivered the first few blocks. I’ve been running a lot lately and my knee has been achy the past few days. So somewhere around 11th and Mass Ave, I decided to just be aware. Aware of the cold and aware of the pain. That was it.

this new year.

One of the things I have come to love about this blog is the way that I can look back over the months and see slices of myself. I can remember whatever quirky thought or emotion had me so captivated that I wrote it down. The more freely and openly I write here, the more impulsive my fingers fly, the more honestly I am able to see myself.

I don’t write because I am terribly terribly afraid of being bad at it. I don’t write because I have other things to do that are not as hard. I don’t write because I know I should. I don’t write because I am undisciplined. 

I’ve made some resolutions for this new year. I wrote them all out in a hippy-dippy mindmap. But it actually worked for me. I have felt, especially lately, overwhelmed with things I want to do and what seems like not enough time to do them. Drawing it all out onto one page helped me to remember my priorities and remember how to make time for them.

Today is January 4. We are four days into a new year. This is the year I will run a half-marathon and pay off my car loan and who-knows-what-else. Really, who knows what else?

I notice, the more I read what I write, the stuffiness in my voice. Or seriousness? Or ennui? Whatever it is, it isn’t quite accurate. I am a private person and I tend to write carefully in a way that is acceptable for strangers to read, in the way I might present myself, in life, to a stranger. Generally the stranger will find me quiet and shy and they won’t really be sure if I quite like them. The people who know me well know my ridiculousness. I suspect that the more I write, the more I work my way up to the reveal. The moment I can write just as I am.