other home.

Over the course of one week, the course of my life has changed significantly. I knew it was coming, more or less, but it has taken a good few days to get my head around it. In three weeks, I'm moving to a new city. I'm going for a new job I'm thrilled about and a new life with someone I love. I will be leaving behind four years of friendship and good life in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts was my first other home. It was the first time I set out on my own and made a place in the world for myself, where the good grace of love and community found me and a family of people chose me. That is something beautiful and precious and difficult to let go of. But there is more of it out there and, after a lifetime of moving, I have at least learned the valuable lesson that you never really leave behind the people and places you've known. They are always a part of you. And the ones that matter, the ones that inspire you and make you stronger and better, those ones last.

For three years, I lived in a big house full of people, in the woods of Wellfleet, where there are also beaches and ponds and tourists and long, quiet winters. For those three years, once a week, 14 people sat around a table and had a meal together, cooked by two of us. Sometimes the meal was late and everyone sat in the living room, crabby, waiting, and watching Jeopardy. Sometimes the nights were warm and we sat outside at the long picnic table until the mosquitoes drove us in. Some of the meals were terrible - soggy grilled cheese sandwiches and giant pots of plain white noodles. Some of the meals were epic. There was always the threat of scarcity. When you cook for 14 people, there is always the danger of not making quite enough. Some weeks, I'd had a long day and I could barely tolerate the chatter and noise and press of bodies around the table. Other weeks, I sat down, looked around the table and saw family. I think I will carry forever the beauty of this group meal. The urgency of being together, on good days and bad, the necessity of connecting with the people in your life. The love of food and the gratitude for a gift.

birds & escalator.

I am always cringing over my way of writing so abstractly. It is the safest and easiest way to write - it is also far removed from what is real.

I wrote a very long post tonight, in a word document, and it was crazy and about absolutely nothing. It was very pure stream-of-conscious nonsense. I had the feeling, which I get sometimes, that there is something something SOMETHING that I need to be writing about, but I can't seem to hit it. My hands shake, my arms clench, my shoulders get hot from all the muscles working. My heart races at the desperate need to create, though I hardly know what.

I deleted it all. It wasn't writing for the sake of a product, it was writing because my fingers just needed to move. But I bargained with myself, agreed that I could only delete it all if I wrote something else, here, for people to see.

But I'm not sure quite what to tell you.

I'm finding my voice and it feels right.
I'm noting stories that need to be told and I'm getting ready to tell them.
I am looking for my tribe, a lovely thought someone shared. My people are out there.
I am learning how to live through change and make the life I want.

tell me about the good things.

Here's a task for you: lean back, wherever you are, and tell me about the good things. You have them and so do I. We should talk about it for awhile because there is quite a lot to be grateful for, here and now, and I don't know what else to make of life but to sit back and be grateful for it. My life is very good right now, but it always has been so.

I have been young and lonely and without purpose. In their own ways, love and passion and purpose have found me. That's what I'm talking about. Tell me about the good things.

A lot of people suffer in this world in ways that I cannot measure or understand. My very keen sense of justice makes me feel guilty at the great love and friendship and passion that have filled up my life. I feel guilty at my paycheck and comfortable bed and good food. This is a struggle for life, I believe. I will find my own ways to make peace with the evil in the world and the human suffering. In the meantime, the best thing I know to do is to be grateful.

My family has taught me to be curious and generous and to work hard. Good friends have stood in a kitchen with me over wine and food and talked about hurt and love and struggle and life. A good man has believed in me, sometimes more than I have believed in myself.

I wish I could conjure up something more eloquent or artful to say to you tonight, but I can only muster this: my life is good. And I am grateful.

some good talk.

What do you want to talk about tonight? There are days I get hungry for good talk. I don't want to talk about my day, what I ate, what I did, where I went. I don't want to talk about the weather and public transportation and paying rent and making money and I don't want to ask or answer the question, How are you?

You know what I mean when I say good talk. The stuff that makes up living: belief, love, hope, suffering, compassion, service, purpose, death, loss, religion, government, good, evil, and on it goes.

I would be in a happy world if I could ask every stranger I met if they believed in a god and why or why not. I suppose survival dictates that we can't bare our souls to everyone we meet, and I'm certainly not the soul-baring type. But I would like to know people.

Back in October, I joined Twitter because, for years, I've been following the journal Creative Nonfiction. They have a running contest for tweets - Tiny Truths, as they're called. I would get the newsletters and see the winning tweets and think, Man, how cool. I wish that was me.

So I joined and I've been tweeting every so often and a lot of my tweets have been picked as winners in this contest. But the big prize is that a few are selected for each quarterly journal. And it is May and Creative Nonfiction: Issue #44 is out in the world now, and one of my tweets is in it.

always fears, you know.

Yesterday, in my empty kitchen, staring at I-don't-remember-what on my computer, I felt it with a rush: something I need to write about. I postponed for a few moments, made an omelette, dusted my bedroom, cleaned the toilet. And it was lost. Even now, more than twenty-four hours later, I can't remember what I was so longing to write about. There was a time I would have mourned such a loss, but not so much these days. I lost hold of an idea, but the brain that thought it up is still in my head. That idea or something like it or something better will come along again. It's much like Annie Dillard says, we shouldn't be afraid to use up good ideas as they come. We don't need to save them up, because more will come.

Stories build empathy and empathy build connection. Do you realize this? Do you know the power of a story? It isn't a luxury.

I have been thinking about stories quite a bit lately, thinking about the ways they weave all through our lives. Not just in a book or on a stage or flashing through a TV screen. But we live our lives as stories, we organize our thoughts and feelings as such, and our very way of thinking is driven by it. Why? I am ticking off books-to-read on the subject, and so longer grows my books-to-read list, as it has been doing since forever.

I am a writer tonight. A few good things have come along to remind me. Good words.

I feel sad sometimes that writing is less the form of common communication that it used to be. It's a sort of default for me, and often so much easier than talking straight from my mouth. I have been known to hang up a phone without saying anything I meant to, followed by an email or letter that says all the rest.

quite right.

I know, it's been awhile. Actually, it's been awhile for awhile. I would like to apologize, but I would also like to say that it's been necessary, or at least I think so. Things here were feeling stale to me. I've grown tired of saying the same thing same thing same thing. It's started feeling a bit whiny, at least in my own ears.

So for these two weeks, I have been running my brain over and over the whole lot and searching for something - a new direction, a new sense of purpose, a new "why" as in why I am writing here and why you might be reading here. No matter the gaps and the absences, I came here as a way to hold myself accountable. And for the most part, it has worked. It would be quite a shame to give up now. I believe, somewhere in me, that I have reached the giving-up-moment, that is the moment when everyone wants to quit. And I believe that the difference between success and failure is getting through this moment and to the other side.

I still don't know quite where to take things, but can I ask you to stick it out?

I have been writing this post for days because I don't know what to say. I don't think anything has resolved itself in my head. I think I might be a fool sometimes for hoping to resolve my thoughts and my purpose and myself. In fact, that might be the thing that paralyzes me most.

Have you ever had a big, stretching, yawning weekend with nothing to do but make a pot of soup and write and somehow all you did was make the pot of soup and didn't write, not one single word? I have. But enough of that.

think about things.

Last week, I heard John D'Agata and Jim Fingal read from their book, The Lifespan of a Fact. I have been thinking ever since of what I could say about it or even how I felt. The honest truth is that it's a little difficult for me to separate my intellectual thoughts from my starstruck awe. I know it might be just me, but John D'Agata is a major literary celebrity in my life. As I've mentioned before, his collection The Next American Essay single-handedly turned me on to writing that I didn't only love, but writing I wanted to create. Which I think would be the moment I became a writer.

At any rate, the reading was entertaining and thought-provoking, but not as whipped up as I'd hoped. John D'Agata mock-rolled his eyes every time Fingal read one of his sections pointing out D'Agata's accuracy errors. Or maybe it was for real. There was a major element of performance in the reading, which I think must also be read into the book. It is an exaggeration for the sake of a point.

What has stuck with me, however, is a moment towards the end of the Q&A that followed the reading. I can't for the life of me remember what the question was, but I do remember D'Agata's intensely thoughtful answer as he explained what he believed the essay to be. The largeness of it, in my opinion, defies any simple understanding. Or simple explanation.

I think too hard about things. Life things. Philosophy things. Science things. Religion things. Decision things. I carve out a lot of thinking time for myself so that I can just sit and think about all these things. I take myself a bit too seriously sometimes, but I think we all do. Things that have to do with why and things that have to do with rules aren't always worth thinking about. Sometimes thinking about those things only screws you up. Do I make sense? I hope not. That is, after all, the point of philosophizing: confuse everyone and act smart. Isn't it?

plugging in.

This night, I have cleaned the kitchen, done two loads of laundry, made a large pot of curry split pea soup, killed time looking at apartment listings, and eaten an embarrassing dinner of crackers, spreadable cheese and pickles. But I have managed to fight through anyway and get down to work. Other things seem more important. Suddenly I suspect I should make a loaf of bread. I feel the need to clean out my closet.

You might be tired of hearing about this procrastinating and putting off and distracting myself. Trust me, you're not as sick of it as I am. But I mention it only to give proof that I'm continuing to slog through it and make progress in the way that I do.

There are many reasons I know I should write. One is this: sometimes I read a book, a page, even a sentence, and while I'm thinking of its beauty and appreciating it and reveling in it, I'm also thinking: I wish I had written that. So I keep on taking things in, out in the creative world, and these things mash around my head and I hope for the best. I hope that my own style will come out of it. You keep taking it in and taking it in and taking it in and something will come out. That's physics, I think. Action and reaction.

I read a chapter of a book today. I sat very still and got tingly feelings in my fingers. Shallow breath and eyes that blurred around the rims from intense focus, from lack of blinking. These things happened. I got the restless-leg-syndrome feeling in my arms and clenched my fists over and over to soothe it. This is what my creative impulse feels like. It is the highest high I know. Seeing something brilliant and wanting to make something else while wishing you had made this awesome thing you're looking at now. It is this single moment when I forget fear, inhibition, failure, rejection, propriety, even life itself. The world is suddenly so big, so full of things for me to see and write and tell and I realize I am staring at this screen with my eyes jacked wide open like it's all unfolding before me now. I'll open them wide enough to take it all in.

satisfied mind.

I am feeling very stubborn. I don't want to write and I definitely don't want to write anything particularly beautiful or inspiring. I want my fingers to do their thing, somewhat removed from my brain and beating heart. I want some words to spill out of me and be cut off. I want to cast them out.

For my sake, I've told myself that I can write anything tonight. I can write anything as long as it's something. No order no structure no meaning no censor just write write write. My pride resists being told what to do, it resists criticism and even encouragement. But someone very wise said to me last night, "Write about it, write about it, write about it." I dropped my eyes and mumbled, "Ok. But maybe I don't want to write about it, maybe I just want to talk about it."

But he knew that really, I wanted to write about it. Or needed to. Whatever.

I feel angry sometimes. Angry over injustice in the world, over the suffering that is ignored, over the hurt and pain caused in the name of money or religion. I feel sad sometimes. Sad because people die and life is sometimes dull and we can never accomplish all that we hope. I feel discouraged sometimes. I cry when I shouldn't, I procrastinate when I should work, I read books by writers who are not very good but seem to be making a lot of money. People that I love dearly are unhappy sometimes, they work too hard, they don't have the things that they want, they feel dissatisfied and incomplete. There are other people that I want to love, but I don't try hard enough. The man at the corner rattling the cup for change. The neighbor who never says hello. And others, just the people all around. We should be loving them all. I don't always do it.

doing.

Just about one month ago, I wrote about urge to stop and why you shouldn't. I ended with the reasons why I write, which are all changing and always different.

Two days ago, I had a conversation in a very loud Tex-Mex restaurant. It was a conversation about art, the reasons for art, the meaning to be found in life, the definition of truth. And how the rice was sort of bad.

These are things I think about often, perhaps even too much.

I was spurred on this last weekend because I read a comment somewhere, of course I don't remember where, arguing that the end goal of any piece of writing is to get at truth. In nonfiction, this is clear. And even fiction, or poetry, or any other writing - they are all trying to get at truth in their own ways. This is actually a way of thinking that, in the past, I very much ascribed to. Lately, I'm having some trouble getting myself there.

I have been hung up on this for sometime, but I'll say it yet again: I don't think I know what truth is. There is reality. As someone put it to me recently, there is the location and action of each atom at each moment. But perspective, human memory, awareness, imagination, all of it creates a world that is lots of gray and not much black and white. So what is this thing that we are trying to get at?

I question my motivations for writing. I don't mean that I question their validity, only that I question what they are. With each day, even each slow ticking hour, they change.

what you need.

Hello blog reader friends. Can I call you that?

When you're writing for a blog, or writing in general, it can be lonely. You're writing for other people to read, but you aren't there when they read it, so it feels very far away. There's a large disconnect in this grasping attempt at connection.

I can't give you something whole tonight. Can I give you the fragments I have?

I was thinking this weekend, I haven't written on the blog in awhile. Then I opened it to discover I haven't written in over two weeks. I am sorry, but my brain had to be devoted to other things. And you'll be happy to know I was writing, just not here.

Don't stop to think now. Don't stop to think about your failures or shortcomings. Don't stop to think. The moment I roll back on my haunches and raise my eyes to the ceiling, the moment I say to myself: What should I write next? then it's too late.

I have been thinking lately about the urge to structure and control time. I suffer at the mercy of this urge often, although I'm getting better at letting myself relax. Still, it takes a conscious effort. On a late Sunday afternoon, I'll start to feel a bit frantic and stressed and then I'll remind myself: You don't have to do anything.

a man.

This man is so pale, his hair so dark, that he's translucent. I look and see straight through him. I see the red bricks of the church and the unnameable damp color of the sidewalk. I look under his feet and see no footprint, no footstep, no sound.

He walks slowly. Not the slowness demanded by age or injury, a slowness marked by some deliberation. Each foot lifts, quickly, rises to the height of the step, and then hesitates. It is brief, but if you stare like I do, you'll see it. And so he walks just above the sidewalk. His steps dig into the air, catch, and hold there.

Something makes his image crawl through my brain. Something makes it impossible for me to forget.

Both times I saw him, he carried a package. Both times, I forgot to look closely to see what it was. In my mind's picture, he is carrying an indistinguishable brown box. Both times I saw him, he carried it with both hands, held firmly, squarely in front of his body.

I hope I see him again. One more look, I suppose, and all my questions will be answered. I won't tell you the answers though. You might wish to decide for yourself. You might know, already, what pain he has felt and what keeps him up at night, still, so many years later. You might know, already, what he carries and who he's taking it to. You might know, already.

You might wish to look for him yourself. He might be walking just behind you on another damp sidewalk. You might be looking straight through him without even noticing. Now that you know, maybe you'll see.

real.

For dinner tonight, I put my entire face into a mixing bowl and licked out brownie batter. I mean, my entire face was in the bowl. There was also a pot of soup growing cold on the stove. But after putting my face into the brownie batter bowl, I wasn't hungry for the soup. I think the soup was good and I meant to eat it for dinner. But then I ate brownie batter.

Real life is not perfect. It isn't always beautiful either. My brownie batter face was not beautiful. But I'm an independent lady and sometimes that's how we eat dinner.

I have a few things I want to write about tonight and I'm not going to write about any of them. I have typed a sentence here, in this very spot, and erased it. I've done that a dozen times in a row. A different sentence each time. A different thought each time. When this happens, when I get the edit trigger that I can't stop, then I know it's too late. I need to forget about it and just tell the honest stuff.

I want to write my thoughts on the ways we trick ourselves into writing.

I want to write about the goals we set and accomplish.

I want to write about why some things are easy and some things are hard.

I want to write about the man who gets off the bus at Powderhouse Square to open the laundromat at 8am every morning.

at the beach.

Three years ago, I parked my car at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown and stared out over the water. I was taking my lunch break. I was writing in a notebook. It was February. At that time, things in my life had taken a sharp turn. A plan had been shattered. Trust had been broken hard. Everything felt, in a word, bleak.

I sat at the steering wheel of my parked car. I gripped the wheel, shivered a bit, let the sound of waves fill my head. I remember looking out over the expanse of the bay and thinking, The ocean and the sky are the same color. I don’t know why, but it felt very profound. It was everything I felt. Life was covered with a thick gray blanket.

The ocean always has a way of pushing my thoughts out of my brain, in whatever form they’ll take. Something about the waves, something about repetition, something about the rhythm of introspection. Maybe this is why I couldn’t really be a writer until I came to know the ocean. And sometimes it is bleak. Sometimes it’s stormy. But peace doesn’t come from feeling peaceful, it comes from feeling everything as each thing passes.

This past weekend, I drove out to the Cape for a day. I just had such a craving. I needed to be hit in the face with salt air. I needed to see the familiar things that trigger the home feeling inside of me. Saturday morning, I picked up a croissant at the Boulangerie and drove to White Crest Beach. I parked and sat in my car. The sun was very bright and the wind was blowing hard. I saw a handful of whales surface - just the spouts blending with rolling waves. I wrote there for two hours in my notebook. Sand was pelting the windows of my car and it was rocking a bit in the gusts of wind. I wrote until it hurt my hand to grip the pen. I mean, I was gripping it hard. I drank an espresso out of a Dixie cup.

lessons.

Many years ago, I read Wendell Berry's novel, Hannah Coulter. There was a lot to the story and a lot I don't remember. I do remember the title character reflecting on some lesson that someone in her life had taught her. And from there on, I began to note what lessons there were in my life, who was teaching them to me and whether or not I was hanging on to them.

Write about that.

Someone who loves me has been saying those words to me, and often. I have resisted them. I have resisted. I mean, I'm resisting them right now. I can't tell you why, or maybe I can. There are a lot of things that can make you freeze. Fear and doubt are two things.

And what is there to be afraid of? Someone asks me. And I answer, but the answer said out loud is much less believable. So maybe there is nothing at all. Nothing to be afraid of. No reason to resist. No more excuses. No more.

forget.

Just start. I say it in my head often.

You think it’s no big deal. Just taking a break, just waiting a bit longer, you’ll do it later, and later, and later. And then you’re staring at the paper, staring at the screen and your fingers won’t move. They just won’t. You’re trying to form some thoughts in your head, but the attempt at awareness destroys every thought that was there.

A good practice is to write things and then forget about them. Just write it, write something, and don’t read it again. Save it in a file, in an email draft, in Google docs, in a notebook hidden on a shelf. Don’t read it again for a week, a month, a year. I think I learned this from Natalie Goldberg. It takes some of the pressure off. You might write something horrible, but you know what? You don’t even have to read it. You just write it down and tuck it away for some other time.

The beautiful thing that happens is sometimes you discover some magic in what you’ve written that, at first glance, you didn’t know was there. It might be sort of better than you first thought. You might sound a bit more inspired than you felt. But most beautiful of all is when you read something your hands wrote, but you don’t remember writing it. Suddenly you can look at your writing with some objective criticism, but also objective compassion. The words exist separate from yourself.

thank you, john d'agata.

I was more or less born a reader, if one can say such a thing. What I mean is that, from the moment I learned to read, I did it voraciously. I read quickly and eagerly. I always loved language. I was not likewise born a writer. I mean, I understood grammar. I could write clear sentences and well-organized paragraphs. But the idea of writing creatively never crossed my mind.

My final year of college, I decided to turn my English minor into a major and, subsequently, I crammed a lot of credits into two semesters. I had more or less covered the literature courses I needed, but not the writing. So I took what was my first real creative writing class. I'm going to risk one great big cliche by saying: it changed my life. I read Brenda Miller's A Braided Heart in the anthology Writing Creative Nonfiction. I heard the term "lyric essay" and I instantly fell in love. I can't tell you why exactly, but it made my heart pound. So, in a wave of impulse, instead of using my senior thesis to analyze a literary work, I used it to study the lyric essay and create my own.

I'm having all this nostalgic reflection because, during this past week, John D'Agata has ignited some controversy surrounding his forthcoming book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Those many years ago when I began to explore creative writing, John D'Agata was something of an idol to me. Not because I knew him, or really anything about him. I had his collection, The Next American Essay, which I thought was very cool. And I had the original issue of the Seneca Review that began to advertise and publish what was called the lyric essay.

leaps.

This is what it's like to be an independent lady.

I got to work this morning, wearing one of my four hipster-cool professional outfits. I wore a belt over my shirt in another attempt to make it look like I have more than four hipster-cool professional outfits. Got to work, looked in the mirror, belt looked dumb, took it off. And then I realized my shirt had a hole in it. Not a hole in the armpit or the seam or a tiny hole no one will see. It's a big ass hole right on my stomach where a tiny patch of stomach skin is shining through. It's the kind of hole you get when you wear a shirt over and over and over because you're an independent lady who is out in the world making not-much-money.

The beautiful thing about this day is that I don't care.

Some people love to plan life out. They imagine a big picture and the various twists and turns they hope their lives will take. While I'm a planner to my very core, I hate the big plans. Hate isn't even exactly the right word - I am incapable of planning my life in this way. I have no desire.

You want me to plan a vacation? A grocery list? An independent ladies' dinner? Done.
You want me to plan my life? Not gonna happen.

there is still this.

In January, instead of averaging three posts a week, I barely averaged one. I don't have a particularly good excuse for this. I've been around, mostly. I have time. I have been writing, although rather loosely. Actually, I've even written several posts that just never made their way out here. I certainly have plenty of good emotion to work with, which is oftentimes the only spark I need to get moving.

Well, whatever it is, it happened and that's that. I am inclined to hate myself for my failure and to be paralyzed by what I perceive as lack of talent, ability, commitment, and the like. If you do this sort of thing, you know exactly what I mean. If you don't...well, you lucky bastard. You're probably much more at peace with yourself than I am.

It's happened often in the past, especially in my journals and notebooks. One week without writing will stretch into two weeks, then a month, then suddenly I'm looking at writing that is months ago and I don't even know where to begin.

I hate this fear, this feeling of being frozen in some mess of personal standards and emotions I don't understand. So listen, I'll try to be better, as I always do. But this time I'm not going to berate myself for mistakes made and failing to live up to my own expectations. I will just start again.

listen.

The noise in your head is so loud that you can't listen to music, you can't listen to the radio, you can barely listen to the sounds of cars on the street and the wet thud of your boot heel. There is too much in your head and you are tired, so tired, of noticing everything and feeling everything and swallowing it up until you can't find yourself. Where will you find peace? What will you do when you walk in the door and tears form in the corners of your eyes? How will you understand?

Sit down and write. Sit down and read. Sit down and meditate.

Remember this: sometimes there's no great meaning to the world and each passing emotion. They exist. Let them.

Now, listen.

I mean, listen.

LISTEN!

Listen to your own thoughts and feelings and every other sound in this world around you. Just listen! Stop asking, thinking, making, excusing, explaining. Just listen.

When you are done listening and you feel full, then pick up your pen to write again. Have something to eat. And write again.