look, there’s an egg in a book

Two years ago I saw a call for submissions on Craigslist: a book for 20-something struggles. I was struggling.  I wrote a scrappy essay. Then I spent the afternoon taking artsy black and white pictures of a broken egg in the sunshine. Um, yes. I did. I do these things, sometimes. Don’t ask why. I can’t remember if I ate the egg afterward. I was pretty hungry in those days. But I had stuck my finger in it to make the eggshell just right, and to change the shape of the goop so it caught the flicker of light. Eating the egg would be kind of gross, after all that  poking.

I’m a little embarrassed.

And now, I’m told, the essay and/or the picture are in this book: Quarter Passed. Gulp. Who knows what it looks like, this embryo of my youth.

in Bennington, Vermont

Apart from Susan Cheever’s discovery that I have Freudian drives, life is relatively mild in this snowy scholarly land. Looks perilous ahead, as there’s some serious work to be done at the other end: to write, and re-write, and write again, to re-write again, to write, again and again. (Yes, that sentence should be murdered).

On the brighter side, my new teacher,  Wyatt Mason, (writer of Harper’s Sentences, among other batches of brilliance) is a kind genius. I feel rather unworthy of his gracious, insightful editing, but it will certainly make it less daunting to go, word by word, into the dark.

creativity, creation…

Once again, I picked up The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. Re-reading her thoughts sometimes helps nuzzle me in a creative direction. Admittedly, the word “God” makes me a little itchy, as does the “art-is-all-encompassing” philosophy. Still, intuitively, I believe every breath. The relationship between the divine (whatever you call it: Yahweh, nature, mojo) and creativity is hand-in-hand, or soul-in-body, or heart-on-paper… Yes?

Cameron’s Basic Principles:

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy, pure creative energy.
2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life – including ourselves.
3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.
4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.
7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God; good orderly direction.
8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.
9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.
10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

A story of wilderness, nakedness, re-birth

[I just went to a storytelling workshop for Vinotok. This is the story I told.]

My parents tell me that I was conceived camping… in the rain. They say, there was foam. I do not know what foam is like, but I do know about rain. And about camping. And I wonder if this is why I love being in the rain, being outside, being naked outside.

As little people, my sister and I played in the sand, happy as naked clams. We buried each other like sea shells in the sand, we felt the fresh breath of the ocean on our bare skin.

When I was older, I went to boarding school, and we spent a lot of time outside. Naked. We rode horses in the woods, Godiva-style. We’d take kayaking-camping-trips, and sneak out for topless, moonlight paddles, feeling the milky cool air brush our nipples. And sometimes, late a night, I’d hear a little knock on my door, and I’d open to a clan of wild girls. Naked. In running shoes. So I’d take off my clothes, tie up my shoes, and around we’d go, through the orange groves, cupping our breasts as we ran through the nighttime whispers.

Older still, I took a backpacking trip along the Abel-Tasman track, in New Zealand. Naked. No, not really. I set out alone with very little on my back. I slept in a cove on a very small beach, with no one around. But early in the morning, I heard a voice outside my tent. The park ranger wanted my camping permit. I opened the tent and said, “I’m sorry, I’m penniless.” Shining back at me were the bright-blue eyes of a handsome young man. So then, I did what any normal 20-year-old female would do, I said, “Would you like to go swimming?” He did. He also happened to be an artist—his favorite subject: the female body. And he also happened to be free, two days later, when I would finish my trek. So he took me to all his favorite spots on the West coast of New Zealand, and in exchange, I posed for him, my flesh against the smooth skin of a rock.

And one day, when my bones turn grey and my body crumples, I will hear a loon chant, I will hear the wind call, and I will go outside, and I will lie my bare body on the ground, where it has always been, and my soul will blend with the sky, where it has always been.

Velveteen truths

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.  ”Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.   “It’s a thing that happens to you.   When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.   “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse.   “You become. It takes a long time.   That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.   Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.   But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Composting cutesy foo-foo

Bernard hates word fat. Given my loquacious love affair with language, seeing the word “excessive” scribbled in the margin was no surprise. Still, I was disappointed that my romantic musings were being banished and sent to foreign lands. Forever. Take, for example, the big “X” through this paragraph:

It is a funny thing, we have. The distance between us might be measured by unkissed kisses, millions of kisses, which would happen in auburn moments, in unturned moments, in a parallel world. Maybe, in that world, he is younger and I am older, maybe I am a man and he a woman, we are unisex creatures, we are aliens, we are little-love-making-mongrels and our tongues meet each other warmly like apple pie in the wintertime, maybe a la mode.

Oh yes, I know: it’s a complete waste of space. It soothes me with the sticky taste of imagination, but doesn’t strengthen the sensation of “what if” that feeds the story. Alas, I deleted the rot, but then decided to paste it here, so the rambly little words wouldn’t feel so rejected—now they are less like trash, more like compost. And, of course, I did it for Emily, whom I miss already….