The language of watercolor is poetry. The naming of colors is a history I’ve never learned. Colors help us classify animals, minerals, and plants. A language of colors is classification. A science of color.
The definition of color reminds me that it is actually light. Waves. Movement. Defined by my eyes.
The artists and the DIYers create a new spectrum of names. Of words. Of thoughts. Sometimes color names are local. Regional. Reflective of a climate. Sometimes they are the raw materials of an environment. A mortar and pestle grind pigments from the ground beneath the artist’s feet.
A story unfolds of where you live. Reflected by color.
A color with a good name is memoir.
Listen:
Ruta’s Dream
Rose Ashes
Rosso Magenta
Night Raspberry
Gerda’s Pink
Ponder (a grey)
Emotion (an aqua)
Rose Madder Deep
Burnt Sienna
Blue Gray Deep
Cerulean Blue
Aureolin
Painting is the language of fantasy. Values, shapes, shades, and forms take the place of words.
Learning different painting techniques slowly unfolds a story. Stroke by stroke with paint and pigment. Saturation.
A short story is told in hues.
A novel is told with layers.
A library builds of paintings.
The language of drawing–a bit different–is very much the language of fiction.
Listen:
Disappearing lines
Texture
Shading
Atmospheric perspective
Gestural line
Symmetry
Vanishing point
The pigment to water ratio is meditation.
The language of a mood.
Hue
Version
Warm, cool, hot
Wet, dry
attribution I have a special love for botanical drawings that capture all the phrases of a plant’s life. A memoir in paint and lines.
My hands can’t do what my mind dreams.
What I see. What I think must be easy to do, but is, in fact, quite difficult. Much like the books I want to write. What I dream up and what I try to conjure never really comes together. Sometimes I don’t have the study space to make the mess I want to. I’m trying to plan for that someday. Some days I make do.
I’m not sure how to draw or paint in a way that would stop me in my tracks if I saw what I’ve done hanging on a wall or in an airport or a school. Anywhere public really. I’m trying to get there. I miss wandering art galleries and museums. Some days. Somedays.
I create circles and tear drop shapes with layers of paint. I’m practicing lines. I’ve watched some painters use a lot of pigment onto the page, and they pull or “lift” the paint off the page as they try to control what happens to the water pigment ratio.
I didn’t know what that meant until just this summer. It’s a way of absorbing the paint onto the brush, so you can control the water. I did it by accident beneath three waterfalls in one of my favorite mountain chains. It took me almost a year of practice to be able to do it. Maybe I just needed to walk fifteen miles like I did that day to give me a loose enough hand and lack of precision. I wasn’t so focused.
Every single watercolor teacher I’ve listened on the interwebs tries to convince listeners that you have to embrace the lack of control. Don’t let it frustrate you, they advise. They try so hard to convince you that this is the beauty of watercolor and that it should not frustrate you. I feel like they spend a lot of time talking you into why it’s amazing, and I’m like, yo. I’m here. Let’s get to it.
I’m not the audience for this advice; the chaos of water and color is why I’m in love with it. What I’ve loved from the start.
I’ve been trying to make my way back to writing.
This is the thing. Here’s the thing.
Names of pigment I love to whisper.
Listen:
Red Ochre
Minium
Deep Smalt
Used in a sentence:
When I try to explain the labor conditions of adjunct teachers, it feels like a pit of red ochre I have to climb out of or it will swallow me whole. Some days I’m lucky if I can turn my thoughts from minium into sentences. The deep smalt tastes like smoke and burnout.
None of those sentences make sense, but I love the way they sound.
Watercolor is the first thing I’ve learned to do where I am aware of building muscle memory. I’m aware of what isn’t possible as I am learning something for the first time. It’s made me more empathetic. It’s made more empathetic towards myself.
I’m currently working on a project where I practice painting lines, small boxes, shapes, and curves. Drills that somehow look like something whole in the evening hours. Then I write a quote that helped me through the day or something that I’ve learned. To call it an art journal is generous.
Here’s what I quoted yesterday in the journal. Words that help me after a really long week of smoky skies, waves of rage and acceptance for the beauty, my life, all the things I hope to either notice, paint or type someday. Some day.
These words? They help too:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings. ~Elisabeth Kübler Ross
One of the words you frequently when you read about grief, is the adjective heavy. It’s made me think quite a bit about how we explain a complex emotion that is both physical and emotional. This week I finished the best book I’ve found about the topic of grief, and it’s not just about the sudden loss of this woman’s father, she also writes about her relationship with a hawk, and her study of T. H. White. It’s a story about a woman who isolates herself during a hard time while she communes with nature and spends a lot of time reading.
Here is my favorite passage in H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald:
There is a time in life you expect the world to be always full of new things and then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow, and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of space where the memories are (17).
I love this passage not because it’s beautifully written–it’s the way she makes a feeling tangible. An emotion–a loss–takes up space. It become a noun. It becomes a thing with heft. Heavy.
It’s not just my personal loss that has me on this subject, it’s this life we’re living in the pandemic. The weight of the affective labor to pretend like everything is okay. Maybe it’s to perform a job during the week. Maybe it’s the face you put on for those on the other side of the screen. Maybe it’s words you say to support those who need you. This life we live during this time of unprecedented loss and uncertainty. It’s a lot.
Heavy.
Something else.
This week I checked out about a dozen art books from the public library. Well, really, I picked them up at curb-side. I want to learn more about watercolor paintings. Still. This thread is with me everyday. I need to turn pages as a break from the screen.
One of the books had an old photo of the AIDS Memorial quilt–something I have not thought about in quite some time. I decided to look up the current status of the quilt as a public memorial, and what I learned gave me great pause. The amount of deaths does not shock me, the size of the quilt isn’t a surprise, it’s how much it weighs. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, it weighs 54 tons. To put that much grief into an art form to remember a loved one. It’s heavy. In the literal sense of the word.
A very public memorial to help people feel less alone in their grief. Those little squares represent somebody. A life lost too soon. This week a friend told me that grief is really love searching for a place to go, and I thought that was the most succinct way to think about it. When a loss happens, you are also faced with thinking about other losses. Things you haven’t mourned. What you ignored finds you.
The weight of it forces you to pause. Unexpected beauty.
I read one of my favorites writer/illustrator, Ella Frances Sanders, her newest book Eating the Stars: Small Musings on a Vast Universe. She’s one of the most interesting writers, and her posts on Instagram delight me. I drop everything to read her newsletter. I feel like she draws and paints what she cannot express. Maybe her drawings expand more on her writing. Either way, I find her work so inspiring. Interesting.
Here is a quote from her book that I love:
I want to remember that the sky is so gorgeously large, I feel stranded beneath it. ~Anis Mojgan
Yes.
One more thing. A lightness. Something hopeful.
I finished my part of a future art exhibition Kumihimo Wishes. Two lovely things happened as a result of working on this project. I learned how to weave using a kumihimo disc, and I got to make a mess on my dining/art studio table yesterday. When I finished it, I walked it over to a box in front of the artist’s house, and it felt so wonderful to finish my part in something that is yet to be finished. I have no idea what the full project will look like.
The artist asked us to write a wish. So I did. I copied a bit of Rumi and made a wish.
Each night/ the moon kisses secretly the lover who counts the stars. (Rumi)
“Scientific discoveries happen not through method or magic, but from being open to discovery by listening to one’s emotions and responding to intuition. Like a poet, the researcher, as well as the therapist, needs the ability to imagine what the truth might be. Each tests it, but in a different way. The poet words a couplet, the therapist tries a strategy, and the researcher tests hypotheses. A theorist, however, must be aware of all three.” ~Pauline Boss
Hiraeth (noun) A homesickness for somewhere you cannot return to, the nostalgia and the grief for the lost places of your past, places that never were. from Lost in Translation
These two quotes have brought me to this post, and my thoughts still swirl.
I still have much to read, weigh, and consider, but I can’t let go of this thread. Of whether I can weave these thoughts together. Of whether I am seeing something new or if this is an old idea in a new context. Either way, I am rounding the corner of one year of thinking about this pandemic, and I am not ready to make any declarations of what life will be like or what I will do differently in the future. A very dear friend of mine said a beautiful phrase: “When Covid fucks off, let’s…” and it is wonderful to think about. Let us go you and I, when then evening is spread across the sky and Covid fucks off.
Or another: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, when Covid fucks off, I fear no evil.
Or another: What will you do with your one wild and precious life, when Covid fucks off?
Or another: I’m with you in Rockland/ in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night when Covid fucks off.
Though I may be willing to butcher prayers and poetry with this phrase, I’m not even willing to make plans (beyond my job) because I cannot stand the idea of feeling more disappointment. My single focus right now is to be with what I have. Stay healthy, not contribute to the spreading of this disease, and try to ride out the horrific grief of losing the one thing I’ve loved the most. Grief has been my research question, and I’ve been spending a great deal of time trying to understand it.
When Covid fucks off, it will still be with me.
I’m trying to understand two things really. Grief, and why I feel more drawn to creating things than to writing. To put some things in context, I write all day. When I’m not talking to the laptop, I’m writing. I spend a fair amount of time with words. Documenting, correcting, fixing, planning, outlining, revising, answering, remixing, responding, organizing, drafting, publishing, saving, suggesting.
At night, when I clock out, I have not felt like writing since my dog’s brain slowly shut down and I greeted this new life without him. What I am drawn to is watercolor painting, a bit of drawing, some cross-stitch, a wee collage, and knitting. And reading books. Always books.
I haven’t really shared anything that I’ve created because I’ve watched others do this, and the first thing people usually say is, “You could sell that.” Or they bring up the horrid phrase “side hustle.” Or they tell you story about a beginner they know turned full-time artist. Maybe they mean it as a compliment, I’m not sure. And let’s be clear. Nothing I am making is anything anyone would want to buy, and I’m really okay with that. Is it art? Is it craft? Is it handiwork? I’m just not sure I care to name it.
For some reason, I am okay with not being a very good artist, crafty person, or whatever but it bothers the fuck out of me that I have not finished a book at this point in my life. It’s odd.
Writing has been a daily practice for as long as I can remember, so when I read that journaling helps you process grief, well, it has not held the magic solution for me like it does others.
Making things? Small paintings of birds? Sketches of my coffee cup? This helps.
I have nights painting where I am like, “Holyhell, where has this been my whole life?” Other nights I feel like a kid with fat crayons who can’t seem to pull anything together. I go from feeling like I am improving to just making a mess. Wasting paper and pigment. The time I spend at our downstairs table, however, moves by so quickly. It’s astonishing to me how painting kills my internal clock. I know what 20 minutes and 50 minutes feels like with everything else thanks to the years teaching. Try getting students to do something for more than 20 minutes, and you’re doomed. Fifty minutes marks the end of a Carnegie clock hour. Time, in this time of pandemic living, makes very little sense.
Here are some things I feel I understand today.
I have found that I love the language of watercolor. Here are a few phrases I think are accidental poetry.
When you mix water into the pigment, you “wake up the color.”
When you get hard lines because of too much water or paint, you can “take the belly of your brush and you smooth it out.”
When the pigment to liquid is unbalanced, you get “a bloom in your painting.”
Delightful.
When you have the three primary colors, you “create any color that you see.”
What about the colors I don’t see, and how do I not spend every hour of my day imagining them?
While I paint, I listen to podcasts or I watch videos or short tutorials. I’ve been really loving the unedited versions of On Being lately, and it is there, that I relearned the phrase “ambiguous loss” from Pauline Boss (quoted above). She spoke of our current moment–the pandemic, global economic meltdown, all the horrors of America–and I found this phrase quite comforting.
It explains so much. It’s a bit where I am with a lot of things right now, and I didn’t have a word for it, or a phrase. I was at a loss of how to describe this feeling and here it is. Here we are.
This week I’ll read more, think more, paint more, and maybe the words will come together. Like pigment to water to paper.
Until then. This:
Let yourself be silently drawn/ by the strange pull of what you really love./ It will not lead you astray. ~Rumi
“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.” ~Katherine May
Not gonna lie. I took a peak at my drafts to see if I could spin some old words into a post. Nope. All too focused on things I don’t want to talk about right now. So here goes. A quick reflection on two books. One I’m still reading, which always so tricky. And one I can’t stop reading.
I’m half way through, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and it could go south, but I don’t think so. Just listening to Katherine May talk about the book made think it’s a book that I need to read. Very much on the topic of Burnout–a subject that brings me like a moth to a flame.
In particular this quote:
People admired me for how much I got done. I lapped it up, but felt secretly that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping far better. After all, I had colleagues who regularly replied to emails after midnight, long after I was asleep. In actual fact, I was ashamed. I always thought that I, so very wise, would never succumb to work addiction. But here I am, having worked so hard and for so long that I’ve made myself sick. And worst of all, I’ve nearly forgotten how to rest (p. 23).
She goes on to discuss the eventual illness that lead her to take a break and write this book. So two things come to mind for me.
I don’t usually like listening to a writer talk about a book that I want to read before I’ve read it. Because I was in the middle of painting with watercolor, I let the podcast advance to the next episode. Once you’ve got the brush to paper, there’s no stopping on that layer. The magic of watercolor, at least in my eyes, is that it forces you to be in the moment. Once the paint dries, you can see the layer. More importantly the water to pigment ratio changes and you lose what you’re doing. Once you start, you have to stick with it.
Controlled chaos–it’s somehow really relaxing to me.
Second thing. Holymotherofgod they edit the shit out of On Being. I’ve been a fan for years, and I’ve always felt like Krista Tippett is a master interviewer–and she is–but woweeee wow they really edit that first cut to make conversation magic. If only I had an edit team like that! I’ve known they make an unedited version available, I just had never listened until this interview about Wintering. It was somehow really comforting listening to Tippett say um, stammer for her words, and interrupt her guest. That first cut is more like life, more like my watercolor painting–it made me feel better for some reason.
It’s a book I can’t stop thinking about given the time we are living through. I’ll write more once I’ve finished it. Indeed, I am in the state of a wintering after losing my furry best friend.
Another book I can’t stop thinking about is Handiwork by Sara Baume. I’m on my second reading, and it’s the perfect little book about craft, grief, and creativity. She discusses the spaces where she makes art, and how she passes her day. Ugh, it’s so much more. I’m still processing it. There is so much that speaks me in this book. It’s an artist statement in the form of a book. It’s poetry. It’s essaying. It’s a journal. It’s just beautiful. These two pages, in particular, floored me:
BETWEEN THE ACCESSIONS and retreats, the take-offs and the dissents, come rare phases of flow, of soaring (p.56).
Stephen Knott defines the concept of flow as utopia in a moment: the atemporal release and liberation from capitalist time and its schedules by intense concentration on an activity (p. 57).
There are no other words on these pages. Just these mindblowing sentences. Lots of blank spaces to think and consider. The design of the book is lovely.
I don’t want to ruin the book for you, but what she admits at the end became the invitation for me to reread it. That’s really the thing, isn’t it? That’s really what you want to do as a writer. You want to create something that makes a reader say, “Now how does this connect to the beginning again?” It’s that space between showing and telling where the work is on the reader. It’s my favorite place to be. I type of wintering.
Baume also includes photos of the birds that she created for 100 days. A bird a day.
I had already thought about painting one thing over and over again to see if I can improve. I started with house plants, but I think I’m going to take up birds. They’ve helped me on walks now that I don’t look at the ground and at the end of a leash.
So it is.
Baume says it best:
AND AFTER the finishing point, what then? (p. 185)
“Words will follow your path through the garden, on the walkways, benches, and walls. Yet unlike a book, the way in which you read the poem is multidirectional.” ~Maya Lin
I made a small intention that I would blog twice a month this year, and welp, I need to publish something today and tomorrow as to not fail myself so soon in the year. And really, is this a new year? I found myself saying last year when I meant 2019, five years ago when I meant ten, and I still can’t believe that it is February next week. Today the day got away from me without getting to typing on the magic machine, but I really needed a break from words, and the blinking cursor. I have been writing a lot–and thinking a lot–at the jobby job, so it’s hard to get in front of the screen when I have a completely open day. Who cares? Get on it. Okay, here we go.
Earlier this month as I watched the shitbaggery at the capital of my country, I thought about a class that I took on The Word & The Image from a Blake scholar. We spent some of the class studying Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial in DC.
I finally got to visit the Vietnam Memorial in 2013, and it is one of the most deeply moving public sculptures I’ve ever seen. I was on a bike share bicycle, so I didn’t get close to the wall, but I did take a selfie near the year 1974. I saw people crying and doing the ritual of etching names. A very old man in a wheelchair. A woman touching a name with flowers in her hand. People from all over the world speaking different languages. I walked my bike feeling thankful I was able to spend so much time in DC. Grateful I got to see a work of art I admired in person. I love that city.
This memory led me to a few cairns–a trail of thought.
Thinking about DC led me to see if there were any eBooks available about Maya Lin’s work. On my library app, I found her book, Boundaries, published in 2006. In The Before Times, I would have gone to a library or a bookstore. Thankfully this eBook was available, so I downloaded it while I watched the news feeling horrified by my country.
From the very first pages of Lin’s book:
Somewhere between science and art art and architecture public and private east and west
I am always trying to find balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet
Water out of stone glass that flows like water the fluidity of a rock stopping time
Existing not on either side but on the line that divides and that line takes on a dimensionality it takes on a sense of place and shape.
There are spaces in her lines that may be a reformatting of a coffee table book into an eBook. They may be purposeful, like poetry. These lines also appear on several pages with images.
Just gorgeous. I’m not doing it justice here. Check it out for yourself.
I’ve been reading about each sculpture a day so I can think more about her art than the horror of the current moment. She’s introduced me to the work that it takes to create an artist’s statement. How she spends time articulating her art work into words before she creates The Thing. How you have to be able to combine poetry, description, pathos, and logos all in one while still leaving space for a viewer to think her own thoughts. Back when we could go to gallery openings and museums, I loved reading artist statements. She describes the function of the artistic statement same way we might think of Shitty First Draft as writers.
All agree that it is an admirable invention: To paint speech, and speak to the eyes, and by tracing out characters in different forms to give colour and body to our thoughts.
Here’s The Thing.
I am increasingly interested in creativity, craft, handiwork, trauma, joy, and the creation of Things. Where time goes when you are in a state of awe creating something. It starts to sound sloppy and overwrought when I describe it, and most disappointingly like “Flow” but it’s more than that. I just haven’t figured out how to express it yet.
So let me quote William Blake instead:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Thinking about my recent dedication to painting over finishing my book (books if I’m honest), I’ve needed an explanation to help me sort why I am not working on them. You know, beyond living a global pandemic, an economic meltdown, losing my best friend, and the nonstop fuckery from my fellow citizens, that is.
This sentence from Maya Lin made me weep thinking about this past year:
“I think with my hands.”
Yes. And. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?
It’s highly likely this piece will end up lost in your slush pile.
What to say to an editor of an anthology about traveling during a year when international borders were closed? How to differentiate my story from the others? I suppose I’ll just tell you the truth. Despite all the horror of the last year, I published something in the genre of travel writing. This postage stamp may be total waste, but I have taken you up on the invitation to send published work from 2020. Here it is. What joy! Look at little me accomplishing life goals as society around me collapses! I used to wonder if I would have danced to the violins on the Titanic, and now I know. Yes, I would have been there for the encore.
This year, your anthology arrived at my house in a blue and white envelope in my mailbox. Usually I purchase ________________ in airport souvenir stores. Or I read one piece at a time standing in airport bookstores while I am on a layover. Little rituals of my life that ended this year as a result of the Covid pandemic. Like many people, 2020 marked a year where I did not travel. I have been 30 miles from my house by bicycle, and I’ve learned every walking path in the five mile radius from my front door. I’ve watched sunrises from my home office feeling thankful that I have a job. As the full moon crossed my condo skylight, I have blinked tears of gratitude for my home. This year has been remarkable because I’ve read more books than I ever have in one year—142 at the time of this letter. I’m hoping to get to 145 by the end of the year. The words of others have saved me. For as long as I can remember, if I’m honest.
I used to work in a bookstore and I would introduce visiting authors on tour. I sat in the front row and listened to them read and take questions from the audience. Most writers said something along the lines that they wrote their book because it was a story that they needed to read. Fantasy writers said this. Memoirists held back tears when they said this. Romance novelists smiled as they said this. Nature writers. Historians. Fiction writers. A story that I needed to read, they said.
I’ve thought quite a bit about authors this year.
I’ve thought about travel writers and all of the people who have lost their livelihoods. Have the words of others saved them? What books do they need now? What art is being created in the midst of so much grief?
What I’m attempting to do with the piece that you are holding in your hands (quite possIbly poised over the recycling bin) is a chapter from a book that I’ve been writing for quite some time. Four editors turned it into something way better than my original. This past year I had planned to figure out how to finish my book but then Covid hit, as we say. After work, in The Before Times, I used to write. This year, I took up painting and I read the words of others when the sun set.
Being a writer felt too hard this year, so I carved out a predictable life in so much unpredictability. I learned how to enjoy my backyard, new trails, and the horizons close to my home. The girl I was in this story thought pandemics were a thing of other centuries, and if I remember correctly, books saved her too. Even if you don’t select my piece, I have printed two copies just now. One for you and one that I’ll use as a bookmark for the 2021 anthology. I’ll tuck it in between my favorites stories that I will keep close to home.
*This is how not to write a letter to an editor, by the way, but I decided to just say fuck it and send this stranger a letter in a hand painted envelope. Think Zodiac Killer sans the murders and with watercolor paint and better spelling. Forgive the vagueness of this post, but I really wanted to get at least one post per month this year, and well here it is. I removed the name of the editor and the title of the anthology so this horror won’t match up with the Internet Robot that pulls all our thoughts together. Forthcoming in the new year is my historical fiction novel about the woman Wallace Hartley left behind. She’s a time traveler and I’ll meet her at a Siouxsie and the Banshee concert. We’ll bond over both knowing all of the lyrics to “Night Shift” and we’ll smoke clove cigarettes. She’ll tell me how she begged him not to go. Never travel by ship, she’ll say, right before she wishes me a happy new year and tells me that I should really finish that book before I start another one.
Grief, like an apple tree, grows crooked not straight. ~Robert Macfarlane
One month ago, the love of my life and I said good-bye to our dog. Our best friend of fifteen years. He was having more bad days than good, and we decided that the right thing to do was also the hardest thing to do. Neither one of us has been the same since. Each day we suffer his loss in different ways together and separately. I was the one who always woke up early to feed him breakfast and take him out before he settled on a small bed beneath my desk. My love would take him out at night, and he made sure he was covered up with his favorite blankets for the night. I recently learned that our dog would jump into my chair after I went to bed. He didn’t like the way I folded my blanket, apparently, so he’d stare at my husband until he got up and created the blanket nest he wanted on cold nights. The Jedi mind trick of a little dog to his human. I didn’t know he did this every night until we were both crying together remembering this little love of our lives. Little rituals like this we now have lost.
As always, I have turned to reading for solace. I spent time researching for advice on what to do. How best to adjust to this time of grief and severe loss in a time of so much grief and loss. World-wide so many people have lost loved ones, and I know of people personally who have lost dear ones in their lives this year.
One of the bits of advice that I’ve read about grief is that you should spend some time changing your living space. That you should “potter about” a bit to give yourself some purposeful purposelessness. I read somewhere that giving yourself a bit of time to nest will help you through the stages of grief. But this, I thought, is advice before the pandemic has forced us to do nothing but nest. What does one do when you’ve been nesting for almost ten months? Sheltering-in-place. Hunkering down. Quarantining.
In normal times, when I experienced something hard, I ran. Left. Moved on. In normal times, I would have booked us to go someplace where we wouldn’t feel the giant loss of his presence in all the corners of our home that he claimed. In normal times, I would have booked us a place to stare at the ocean together in a climate very different than this dark corner of the Pacific Northwest. I would have made sure we went to someplace bright and cheery. Sure, this would have prolonged our grief, and we would have had to come home to deal with the silence of a life without him, but it is something I would have done before this awful pandemic. What to do with that drive to go someplace and escape when you know it’s not the right thing to do? You stay. You stay in one place. Home. You deal with the pain of listening for his collar shake and loud little snores at night. You deal with the silence and nest.
And this word and all its forms–nest–is what I’ve been thinking quite a bit about.
A friend shared with me a bird nest that she found and cut down to bring inside to her house. “I’m really making myself vulnerable telling you this,” she said as she showed us via Zoom the branches, the twigs, and the nest. I listened to her describe the things she could do with it and I felt nothing but awe and inspiration. This woman recently stayed with her mother as she died, and I saw her plans for the nest as inspiration that life can, indeed, move forward. That creativity can come back. When you know somebody who has lived through losing a parent, you can’t help but think of your own situation. You can’t help but think of beings you have outlived. She went on to share the ideas for felted ornamental birds and other tiny woolen bits she might create, and I shared that I would have judged her only if she had cut it down while a bird was still living in the nest. If there were eggs that she stole–this I would have judged–this beautiful piece of art from nature–I understand.
Later I thought a bit more about this nest, and I wondered if there was a word for stealing the nest of other animals. Are birds like squatters taking up residence in places that aren’t their own? I know that some species will drop off their eggs for other to raise, and I remember being in a biology class with a woman who was outraged about this. She ranted about how careless this was of the mother bird for not caring for its young. As if human beings don’t do the same thing, I remember thinking, wishing she would be quiet so I could listen to the teacher. My friend’s bird nest will become something else entirely in her home.
Her story also brought my eyes a little higher to gaze into the trees instead the tears falling on my shoes as we learn to go on walks without our dog. I’ve found myself looking for nests, and I’ve been looking for birds. Thankfully, I live in a place where there are many creatures to see. “Hope,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is a thing with feathers.” Maybe.
Four days before I made the appointment to end the suffering of my best friend, I heard a ruckus of birds in the trees while I was on a run, and I looked up to see a very large spotted owl. We stared at one another for five minutes or more. It looked me in the eye the whole time, and I stood in place for a long time after it flew off. A majestic creature of the northwest that you can easily miss if you aren’t looking.
This week while walking I saw a bald eagle land on a branch of a tall tree. When it landed and tucked in its wings, the branch broke off. Claws held the branch in free fall. It let go. Swooped its wings once. Twice. Flew to a higher branch. Landed to perch. More hope with feathers.
Yesterday a flock of snow geese flew directly over my living room skylight. I heard them honking before I saw them. Quick white dashes and black beaks through my square skylight. Majestic creatures passing through the northwest. A migration through this home of mine.
This home of mine. Nesting here. During this time of quarantine, as we now say.
One of the stages of grief is called the upward turn–like the way I’ve been watching the sky, but I’m not there. Seeing grief in stages seems so linear. Too clean. Easy. So unlike this life we’re leading. The collective grief of this pandemic and horrors of late capitalism. I couldn’t find anything that seemed quite right to describe what I’m feeling until I listened to “East of Eden” narrated as a podcast from Emergence Magazine.
Thinking of grief like an apple tree, as I quote above, makes sense to me.
Something crooked. Not straight. Something that looks different in every season. I started hunting for apple trees in my neighborhood, and I found several examples that help me visualize our loss. One neighbor has a line of young apple trees that will one day make nice fence as they as they trim the wayward branches into a neat square. Another neighbor has old gnarled trees that grow every which way–a bit wild. Not so manicured. Nobody has raked the front yard. Cleaned up the front yard after the last wind story. Another house has left the apples to rot on their branches and a giant buck gorges itself in their yard every afternoon. More neighbors than not have apple trees.
Another memory of apples from an airplane window. Another life now. When I would fly from the east, I would try to locate the apple farms in eastern Washington with their nice clean rows before the pilot would mention the presence of Mt Rainier and Mt Baker to the north. Home soon, those lines of trees would say to me.
Another bit of advice to process grief is to write, and I’ll admit, the words have not come easy to me. I think writing helps if you are not already a writer. I can somehow write for my job, but I can’t seem to bring together the stories I’ve been trying to write. To edit the book I’ve written. To outline new ideas.
So I do other things.
I’m painting a lot, I’ve knitted a dozen small blankets for my friend’s cat rescue project, I’m slowly working on this large cross-stitch project where I’ve betrayed my inner Victorian lady by going off the pattern. Six or so inches of little thread letter Xs are somehow creating a rose border that I quite love. My hands it seem, need something to do, but my mind just weeps and feels sad. My body doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. All the things, my friends tell me, are normal. It just takes time, I’m told.
Today, on this holiday, we are to give thanks, which I try to do every day of my life. I’ve decided to try on creating the words again and take on the advice of a writer-friend. She and I are part of an anthology just published. Very exciting. She texted me a week ago, and said that her mom thought my story was the best of the anthology after hers, of course. Keep writing, girl-fren, she said. It was the text I didn’t know I needed.
So here it is. This little idea of a nest in the act of nesting. A noun and a verb. Little bits of things found along the way of life that make a nest into a home.
This week, the Feminist Survival Project podcast is going to end, and they asked their listeners share what they learned, and so I thought I’d get bloggy with it as a way to express my gratitude for their podcast and their book. I also wrote this in the final days of my little dog’s life. He lived to 15 1/2 years old, and towards the end his mind started go. Dementia and senility took hold of my best friend, and I slogged up and down hills of intense emotions for over six weeks. He and I went from climbing mountains together to him barely making it to the backyard. Outliving a creature who brought me so much joy is one of the hardest things I have yet to experience. I see no other way to survive this current moment in my life other than to see it through. To face it and all the rituals of life that now seem so strange without him.
For the first time in my life, however, I feel a deep visceral understanding of one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems.
The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and you—beside— The Brain is deeper than the sea— For—hold them—Blue to Blue— The one the other will absorb— As sponges—Buckets—do— The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As Syllable from Sound— c. 1862
So there. Now you know. I’m not the best version of myself right now though I’ve tried to hold it together as best as I can. And that’s just what I’ve been doing for months. Holding it together.
I’m also going to write this blog as a simple wish I’m sending into the universe. I want to understand “burnout” as a state of being and feeling a bit more, and thus I’m really thankful for the Nagoski sisters–I’m going to refer to them as Sestre. Before reading their work, I used to believe you burned out, suffered, made some change in your life, and then you moved on to the next thing. That it was all a cycle, a state of being, and I was so wise because I had figured it all out. You have a problem, you live through it, and then you find The Next Thing. May the bridges I burn, light the way, I thought.
Not this year.
We aren’t just burning the candle at both ends; we are nothing but flame or ash. And when I say We, I mean me and anyone who might feel this way. If you don’t feel this way, please feel free to move on. I don’t need to hear from you that you’re doing fine. Good for you. The Internet is a wide wonderful place, carry on, and I’ll give you twenty minutes back in your life if you don’t need these words.
But maybe you do. So I will write. From syllable to sound.
I work in the space of higher education, educational technology, and professional development, and somewhere in the overlap of these three worlds, I see a lot of references to the word burnout lately. During my last journey through graduate school, I wrote extensively about teacher burnout, and I hypothesized that adopting/adapting/implementing open educational resources into one’s teaching could save people from Teacher Burnout. Capital T. Capital B.
Since that time, I’ve been more involved with the leadership side of adopting/adapting/implementing said resources and practices and this causes another form of burnout I’m not quite ready to name. But it’s a thing. Lowercase A. Lowercase T.
I’ve lived through two pretty substantial periods of career burnout, and I’m not here to share with you how amazing I am nor am I here to make you feel that hair shirt of shame that is already so much a part of your 2020 skin. I’m not going to try to tell you what works, what you need, or what the best method is for saving yourself may be. Only you know. I have no tips or tricks. No cautionary tales. No words of wisdom.
I’m just going to write about what I learned from the Nagoski Sestre and it was a one ton bell clanging in the universe for me. The brain is wider than the sky.
I first learned this phrase from studying Audre Lorde who, in my mind, taught us this phrase because, in short, if you are going to burn down The Man, you need to take care of your own shit in order to sustain the work. Self-care, in the way that I was lucky to learn about it as undergraduate from my feminist professors, is about making sure you have enough energy to sustain the action that will bring about change. What Ghandi called being the change that you want to see in the world.
It’s not getting your nails done or going to spa, or some product that you buy, it’s what you do to preserve your sanity so you have the power to take down The Man. Whatever your particular corner of The Struggle is, your first responsibility is to make sure you–the person involved in fighting an injustice–is rested and ready for what’s next. The notion of self-care that I learned from Lorde was about the long-game and how to sustain unsustainable action and passion for justice and truth that you believe in. That I believe in.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Her message to me as an idealistic adult-returning student willing to get into debt for a college education was to prepare myself for the long-game. Beyond the mountains there are mountains. I wanted to be an educator who helped people like me, and I’m still doing that work, just in another setting than I originally thought. I’m not sure when this happened, but the phrase “self-care” started appearing everywhere in commercials, from Influencers (God help us) and from people who use phrases like “personal brand” and “my followers” without any irony. I feel a combination of disgust and despair when I see advice about “self-care” as an antidote to any stress.
Honestly, I could not really put a pin on what bugged me about this new focus and commercialization of “self-care” and I kept my inner Inigo Montoya words to myself when people gave me advice about taking care of myself.
When I listened to the Nagoski twins, and they shared that what we need isn’t taking care of ourselves, it’s taking care of one another, something clicked for me. I was mid-run and I stopped to rewind it (sorry, I don’t remember which podcast since this entire year has felt like one long Tuesday). Then the way one of them snarked “self-care” in the podcast made me see ten thousand rainbows.
In other words, what we need as a society is not a product you can buy, it’s an action where you turn to yourself and to others with kindness and compassion. They preach this phrase quite a bit, and I honestly I needed to hear it every week in 2020.
From their book:
Wellness, once again, is not a state of mind, but a state of action; it is the freedom to move through the cycles of being human, and this ongoing, mutual exchange of support is the essential action of wellness. It is the flow of givers giving and accepting support, in all its many forms.
The cure for burnout is not “self-care;” it all of us caring for another (p. 214).
I must have read that last sentence 50 times.
And let me tell you, I wasn’t a fan of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle when I first read it three months before I decided to that I needed to take a break from drinking alcohol. I read this book, and I was like, “Fuck. You. Ladies. You. Don’t. Know. Me.” I read the book quickly, and I slammed them with some snarky review on GoodReads (which I have since deleted), and I closed the cover of their book thinking I had it all figured out. I was good. Solid. Fine. Together. Totally good. Totally fine. This is fine.
On the outside, I was holding everything together. I was working for a growing company and I was helping to create a viable 501(3)(c) during my free time (ha ha) while trying be a writer and a recreational bike racer.
In other words, I had two start-ups in my life and I was trying to do All The Things. On the inside, I was starting to get very worried about my health, my happiness, and my ability to sustain the life I had created. I made a list of the things I could control and the things I could not control. And surprise–the columns were unbalanced.
One column was way longer than the other, so I committed to changing the things that I knew I could control, and I researched, read, and spent a lot of time sorting out what I could do to improve my life. A dry January or a Sober October wasn’t exactly what I needed; I haven’t drank alcohol since January 2019. But that’s a story for another day.
Every time I shared some of the things I’ve learned about neuroplasticity and my own habits and what I was doing to change them, somebody inevitably called it self-care.
Sigh. No, that wasn’t it. You keep using that word…
And let me be clear, if this phrase works for you, then please use it. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life. Self-care it up, my friends. You do you.
What I’ve learned from the Nagoski Sestre is the following:
Caring just for yourself is not a cure for burn out.
Having a hard time understanding what burnout is? Me too. Let’s start with something really small. Like let’s say you bought twenty pounds of black beans in March. Bet you’re sick of those black beans right about now. Bet you feel guilty complaining about those black beans because there is so much food insecurity in the world. Bet you then feel helpless. Then you probably want to take a nap, but you have four hours of Zoom meetings where you have to not only deal with the faces of others, you have to constantly stare at your own. And your to-do list never ends. And so it goes. And you just keep thinking about the next thing. Anxiety. Worry. It’s not really cycle at this point, as I understand it, burnout becomes part of the way you’re living until your body takes over and makes you ill and/or depressed.
Here’s the thing.
I’ve become really interested in neuroscience and what it is telling us about learning, and I’ve started to read up on Trauma. I’m grateful to my friend who shared this incredible library guide, and she also taught me that we have to stop asking “What’s wrong with you?” and instead we have to ask “What happened to you?”
Suggesting there is something wrong feeds the flames of burnout while inquiring about what happened to you is that kindness and compassion that the Nagoski Sestre preach.
This subtle shift in the way that we interact with others may help. Especially if you are somebody like me who likes to fix things, act, get shit done. This moment is not for people like us, and all we can do is try to take care of another. We all know somebody who is struggling right now, and I think being able to listen to ourselves and others is crucial to seeing this time through. Kindness and compassion–a tone of voice that we need to hear in our minds. It’s the voice I’m trying to hear when I look in the mirror.
As somebody who likes to feel like I’m fixing things and contributing to something greater than myself, I’m at a complete loss of what to do right now. Sure, I still believe in my work, and I support people and causes that I believe in, but there is so much I cannot fix. Over the last ten months of this hellscape we call America, I have stepped away from my volunteer efforts, I’ve distanced myself from several friends, and I dove straight into working as much as could. I’ve worked on learning how watercolor, I’ve researched, I’ve written, I’ve gone on long walks and runs. I’ve kept a pretty consistent pace as any of you have who are lucky to have a job. You’re either working twice as hard or not all in this country.
This has all, I now realize, been a coping mechanism for me, and I’ve been fine up until six weeks ago when my sweet dog got sick.
And now I have to see this time of grief through.
I’m incredibly grateful for Nagoski podcast, their book, and the joyful experience of me not knowing which one is speaking until they mentioned music (Amelia) or sex (Emily). Thank you for your work, dear ones. I love the Nagoski Sestre for quoting David Bowie as the best advice for a time like this: “Turn and face the strange.”
This I can do. I have no choice.
Maybe you don’t either.
As I was thinking about how to end this post, so I can meet my self-imposed goal of blogging monthly, I looked out the window and got annoyed that I have somehow missed the changing color of the leaves near my house. Autumn has somehow happened and I feel like I’ve missed it. I started to cry thinking about my sweet best friend, and then I realized now that the leaves are gone, I can once again see the hills in the distance.
the view from my office window, attribution c’est moi
I promised myself I’d try to blog at least once a month this year, so here it is. I don’t really have anything in the bloggy draft that I’m ready to click publish with, and I just realized that September does not have another day. In this hellscape we call America, everyday feels like Tuesday. Let’s see. How about some quick thoughts. Fun facts.
1] I did a quick search with the phrases “faculty development,” “burnout” along with the the word “trauma” today and I thought through the essay I would write for faculty developers. Not now. Someday. I’ve been dying to use the Battlestar Gallactica saying “So Say We All” for years as a title. This might be the essay. Can’t possibly write what I’m thinking until we’re on the other side of whatever the fuck this is.
2] I am so entirely in love with curbside pick-up at my local library. Once a week I ride my bike to pick up my four or five books, and I try to smile with my eyes as I thank the lovely librarian who is giving me a bag full of books. I do, however, miss rummaging through the free magazines and old books in the basement. It’s usually me and three dudes who look Jerry Garcia and smell like they have questionable hygiene practices. One dude has been wearing the same sweater for the entire time I’ve lived in Bellingham. I moved here in 1998. I miss those guys.
3] I’ve been reading up a storm. Totally making up for those shitty years for personal reading also known as graduate school. I inhaled Can’t Even: How The Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson.How have I been on this Earth for so long without knowing the phrase “Hope Labor?” I was the Queen of Hope Labor while I was an adjunct. First but not last of her name. Storm born. Breaker of chains.
I stared into space a lot while reading the history of unions in that book, and since I live with somebody who researches about generations, we talked about it all weekend. Or I talked about what I was reading and he got riled up about Boomers and capitalism. Pure joy for me. Lots to dissect with regards to this very fucked moment we are living in, and as a latchkey Gen X’er whose life was blown apart by the disappearing industry of what we now call the Rust Belt, I have a lot of empathy for that generation. And I have to tell you, because I want to stay in a good mood, the sections on social media and being a parent (I can’t use the word “parenting;” it’s like the word “hella” or “influencer”–I just don’t get it. I am the But Why Cat when I hear those words). Okay, social media. Yes. I am so glad I experienced love in the pre-times of social media. When I finally burned all of the notes and letters from a person who broke my heart, it was so satisfying. I rose from the ashes a new woman who would never fall for that shit again. Changing your relationship status to “Single” just wouldn’t have been the same. These are the things I thought about while my brain and heart needed a break from capitalism.
3] I’m reading–very slowly–one woman at a time–Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See The Natural World by Kathryn Aalto, and it reads a lot like an Intro to Ecofeminism collection which I’m totally down with, by the way. I suffered through a class taught by an Eco-Critic (ah, the early aughts, so cute) and I wish this book had existed then instead of the bullshit overpriced anthology I had to buy for the class that was supposed to be on literary theory, but we just talked about his research the whole time. Anyhoo.
When I got to the chapter on Mary Oliver, I was having a particularly rough morning where it had been a week–as in seven days that feel like Tuesday–since I made it through a morning without crying. Aalto explicates the poem The Summer Day which I love love love. This quote made me laugh. Snapped me right out The Funk. The dark corners got light again when I read these words:
“At the end, she asks a question that, paired with the wild animals, prompts us to take stock: ‘What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
To that very question, Oliver once replied in an interview, ‘I used up a lot of pencils.”
“But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked.” ~Cheryl Strayed
Of the three things I’ve learned since I’ve started watercolor painting, what startles me the most is that I don’t care if I’m any good at it. It also forces a perspective shift that I hadn’t expected, and a patience that I didn’t know I had. Unlike writing sentences, you have to wait for the first layer to dry. There is a forced pause in the creative act. With writing, I can type type type without ever having to pause. To think. It’s very easy to keep going to the next idea and the next idea. Whereas watercolor has two speeds. Hurry up and paint the thing so that the pigment and water swirl and do wonderful things. Or hurry and wait and wait until one layer is dry and then you can work on the next thing. For instance, when you paint a landscape, you have to create the sky and horizon first, and then you have to work your way towards the foreground. I haven’t taken an art class in high school, and even then I volunteered to model more than I drew. It’s such a delightful break from things that do not involve writing poetry, nonfiction, fiction, essays, all the work things. A mixed medium to explore and think about while I try to write and rewrite this book.
Somewhere around the time we stopped making mix tapes and buying CDs and started downloading our music from slow dial-up internet, I decided it was a good career plan to get into debt and become a teacher. My grades were suffering because I couldn’t work a double as a cocktail waitress and make time to go to the computer lab to type my papers. My typing skills weren’t great: I had fucked off in typing class in high school with a friend, a cute boy who made me laugh. I saw the debt as worth it because it enabled me to cut back on working double shifts. I had somebody telling me new things to read and stories of history I had never considered. I swan dove–chin out–chest out–into being a full-time student and part-time worker. Turns out this was what I was looking for my whole life.
At the end of this pursuit, at the distant horizon, I would become a teacher.
I tried to ignore my comfortably middle-class classmates who fucked around by getting drunk every night, pretending to have done the reading in the class. I learned very quickly that if I referenced a page number in the reading, the teacher would beam towards me and I’d have an upper-hand on the losers who suddenly looked down at their books nervously hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on them until they had a chance to scan the page. I’m not sure I was aware of how referencing the page was a signal of close reading, I just noted that’s how the handful of smart people in the class did it. The ones who were taking shit seriously. How the teacher did it. I saw my school loans in the distant future the same way you might accept your utility bills to keep the lights on. To keep water flowing out of your taps. To wash your clothes. To make sure a truck rolled up to your driveway and took away your trash.
I’d marvel when I was forced to go see counselors as part of some class or some degree checkpoint, and I’d try to make an appointment around my ever-changing waitress schedule. When I’d finally sit across from a counselor, they’d ask me my plans, and I’d tell them. “Do you have family members who can help you? Surely there is somebody who can help pay for your tuition so you don’t have to work.” As if it’s that easy. I never went to an advisor again. I took a zero on an assignment when I transferred to another school. Their advice wasn’t worth the gas money to get to campus.
Somewhere between the time our country elected the puppet of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Elliot Smith killed himself, I decided I could no longer spend the rest of my career planning for how I would pay for my bills when I was “off-contract.” This acceptable euphemism of the tenured to describe the time where you’re not paid but you’re not eligible for unemployment despite the small stack of degrees I had earned. The letters AA, BA, MA mean nothing when the bills are due. I sorted that I made more money an hour telling lies to lonely lawyers as I served them drinks than I did helping students learn how to read. How to write. My so-called calling didn’t pay my phone bill four months out of the year.
Somewhere around the time when I could no longer lie to students and say it was a good idea to become a teacher and I decided to go back to school, I applied for a loan to consolidate my car payment and some credit card debt. “Do you have a family member who could gift you the down-payment? Anyone in your life who can pay half of what you’ve applied for?” Would I be sitting here asking for this money if I did, I thought.
Somewhere between the time that Americans learned what a “sub-prime mortgage” means and the president sought economic recovery advice from men who worked for Goldman Sachs, I graduated with a second Masters degree paid for the tuition-waiver of Washington State and USDE. I swapped credit card debt for years of loan deferment, and I entered the job market as an instructional designer with a focus on online education. Five years later, the world is a very different place, and again, I’m lucky during unlucky times.
Okay.
That’s a short-esque memoir-ish exercise where I try to be Chuck Palahniuk. Kinda sucks, right? I kinda want to go into a basement and beat the shit out of some strangers now. We can call it Class Resentment Club. Just kidding. For realz, I just read his latest book on writing, and it paralyzed me for an entire day. Check it out if you’re into les belles lettres. Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different.
Like now. When I think about writing and how to communicate the passing of time.
First let me say, that I’m not a die hard fan of his work but I know plenty folks who are. When Fight Club (the book, not the movie) dropped into my circle of waiters-who-read, they loved the violence of the book. Dudes gonna Bro, what can I say. They made me laugh at their perspective on books. Personally, I loved the scene where Tyler Durden slaps some sense into the convenience store about how he was going to spend the rest of his life. It’s a beautiful twist of what you expect and what actually happens. When Tyler describes his apartment, the Ikea furniture, and the things that own you, I was close to weeping. The disgusting brilliance of how they made soap from the liposuction fat. My Bro Bookclub didn’t want to talk about that “class shit”–those scenes never left me. Sitting in the movie theatre, I watched Brad Pitt and Edward Norton capture everything I imagined. Perfectly. I had lost touch with the Bros at that point, but I’m sure they loved the Meatloaf cameo just as much as I did. “Fucking Meatloaf as Bob! Can you believe it?”
I miss movie theaters and bookstores. You?
When my library announced curb-side pick-up recently, I hopped on the chance to order books. I searched for watercolor, watercolour, and books on the craft of writing. By the time I got my chance with Palahniuk’s book, I had forgotten I ordered it.
It’s the best book on writing that I’ve ever read. “I shit you not,” I’d say to my Bro Waiter Bookclub if I remembered their names. If you were my student, I’d tell you to buy this book. (Another sentence-style I’m stealing, if you read it, you’ll see it).
Throughout the book he includes “post cards from book tours” and I loved all them. One of the last ones in the book, he uses this refrain to show the passing of time. A model of what he teaches. Perfection.
Here’s my favorite:
“Soon after the death of my father, but just before answering machines and disposable cardboard cameras began to disappear, I flew to London” (p. 223).
Also amazing, and “hella fucking brilliant” in Bro Bookclub-speak:
“In the last days of road maps and telephone book, before global positioning systems and ride-sharing apps, my French editor hosted a dinner at her apartment on the Left Bank” (p. 227).
If you weren’t alive to watch the phasing out of this technology, you could research. If you were alive, you’re instantly struck with nostalgia and you remember where you were. When you purchased your last disposable camera. Ordered your last AAA Trip-Tik and so on. The reader has to do the work.
Throughout the book he advises that you need a clock and a gun in your work.
Where has this book been my whole life?
The clock marks time, and the gun–well, I really need to go back read more of what he says about that because I got so hung up on the advice about time. How to mark time. How to describe time. How to place time.
The gun, though, he sums it up with “the moment after which everything is different” (p. 226).
Yes, somewhere between the time I read that advice and now, I’ve written pages and pages of the “Somewhere between this and that” like I’ve done above. A revelation. It’s like a ten ton bell. Holyshit. So fun to do. If you’re searching for a way to write about time, especially during a time when it’s so meaningless. We live in a sea of Wednesdays right now, so I think that’s why I’ve been struggling a bit with writing. With everything. Will I share those sentences eventually? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, this edict still rings true: “I don’t want to die without scars.” Thanks, Chuck. Me too.
Spoke & Hub 