There is nothing to ruin a perfectly cozy fall morning than over-poached eggs.  Did I eat them? You bet I did.  Breastfeeding makes me crazy.





I wish you could enjoy this moment with us.  Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach in the parlor, I sit cuddled in Joel's large sweater perusing beautiful photography on Flickr, the best wind makes the leaves dance and I ache to feel that brisk air on my face.  I think I'll go on a photo walk.  Joel is trying to finish his MA, so our house is emanating this quiet, academic study as he reads and works on a paper.  I have thoughts too.

Confession. I don't feel awesomely proud about almost anything I've written, including most of the poems I self-published last year.  In fact, you know how you read an old diary entry from grade 5 wherein you swear your undying affection for Craig, despite his liking Missy instead?  And you know how your gushing, maudlin writing makes you cringe with embarrassment?

That's how I feel about my past work as a writer - even about work completed quite recently.  As I walked  through this gorgeous suburban nook in the city a few days past, I realized that I think I have to agonize over work in order to feel good about it.  It might be a given that we feel that way about past work, just like how we feel that way about past hairstyles, but just in case I am wrong...I'd like to sit with these questions for a bit.

Is the best work of mine best because it is labored?  Does it require blood, sweat and tears to be good?  Is there room for  work that simply comes to you?  And if it is easy, does it mean it's not good?  Are you supposed to bully the easy work into submission as well, infusing it with angst in order to know it has substance?  Am I required to wait for my muse in order to write?  Can a poet be dry and logical or is she required to be a mystic?

Where some artists find a hard time working without their muse, I find it difficult to work with her.  She is just as illusive as most, but most of the time she does not have much of anything to say.  Instead, she creates a little nest in the artistic part of my soul and makes room for us both to sit there for an extended period of time.  She plans the poetry party and holds the door open for me to enter.  

But once I sit across from her, pen and paper in hand, ready to dictate her words, she falls silent.

I have a mute muse.

Others talk about certain memes or totem animals or recurring themes that seem to appear in their work almost entirely without their willing it so.  Their muse seems to take their hand and sketch and they wake from a reverie and realize that they are suddenly compelled to make a certain earring, painting, or picture.  All other projects that they work at with daily diligence take a back seat to this branding iron of ideas.  These artists will be the first to tell you that they work and work and work and hope the muse shows up, but are determined to just work and work.  Still, their muse seems to infuse their mind with ideas.

Mine just doesn't.  My mind doesn't lack words, and I've never stared at a blank paper wondering what to write.  But I cannot say I've ever cried on the floor of my "studio" for working hard at an idea.  I've never worked so hard that I bled.  I just write it and hope it's good (since we are often the worst judges of our work, I don't try to assess my own.  This is a hard practice, to send something out into the world without placing a stamp of approval on it, without trying to control how it will be received  but I feel there is little other way to ensure that I actually do SEND the work out.  Otherwise, I will be paralyzed with fear of quality).

I am no master at my craft, and I really want to be.  I want to take a poetry class, I want to labor over poems and make neat little scratch marks through words and place commas cleverly. Yes, I want to work hard - but I also wonder, is it okay if it just comes easy and angst-free?

Of course it is.

Is your Saturday bustling with chores and social plans?  Are you feeling restless for want of plans?  Are you out hiking or grocery shopping?  Are you snuggled in with cups of coffee and Downton Abbey?

May it bring you what it is supposed to bring you, this day.
And may you respond with awareness and gracious self-forgiveness.

A river flows between us.

A water wrought with words

unsaid and swallowed,

coughed up and splashed about.

When we speak them --

stopping along the wet bank to pluck out the smooth stones

for examination and admiration

of time's stamp upon their unbreakable surface --

We are calmed.  

A bridge then constructs itself,

Extending from your insides to mine.

And again our life raft is tethered together,

navigating the current with not so much ease or grace 

(both are overrated),

but with togetherness,

a kind of connection 

fought for instead of bestowed.

My love,

the distance was not as it seemed.

It was only un-bridged words.

Let's go get a drink and talk.

-09.16.12

p.s. there is still time to join this project...writing a poem or prose each day, finishing to completion.  let me know if you want to join and I'll add you to the private FB group.

Yesterday, while waiting for my body to metabolize the ridiculously sugary drink I had to imbibe for my glucose tolerance test, I finished one of the best books I've read in my entire life. I know I've mentioned it a few times here, but I have to say that I felt this book was written entirely from my own thoughts!  Have you encountered an artist, musician, fashion designer, blogger, or author wherein you found a piece of your very own soul in the alchemy of the work they produce?  While I love to read, and do it often, it is rare that I find such deep camaraderie with an author.  While this book is also a NY Times Bestseller, I feel deeply gratified that it isn't what anyone else is reading (aside from some esoteric erudites I love), hasn't been made into a movie, and isn't popular because everyone loved the TV show.  I want to buy this book for everyone I know.  However, since this isn't possible, I want to share some particularly thrilling passages - and you will probably see why I loved it so.

Perhaps the most beautiful description of writing I've encountered:

Chapter 18: Ryabinin

In reference to Levin's working in the field (Anna Karenina):

"It is getting hotter and hotter, Levin's arms and shoulders are soaked in sweat, but with each successive pause and start, his awkward, painful gestures become more fluid.  A welcome breeze suddenly caresses his back.  A summer rain.  Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord.  Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will."  

She then equates this to writing:

"What other reason might I have for writing if it did not have something of the art of of scything about it?  The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew or thought I might want to know.  This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me. In this way, in the proof and texture of my self, I accede to a a self-forgetfulness that borders on ecstasy, to savor the blissful calm of my watching consciousness. "

On Grammar:

p. 159

"Personally I think grammar is a way to attain beauty.  When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've said or read or written a fine sentence.  You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style.  But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language.  When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way.  And that's where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, 'Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is!  How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!'  I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility.  I find there is nothing more beautiful, for example, than the very basic components of language, nouns, and verbs. It's magnificent, don't you think!"

On the beauty of trees:

p. 169

"I began to understand why I felt this sudden joy when [he] was talking about birch trees.  I get the same feeling when anyone talks about trees, any trees: the linden tree in the farmyard, the oak behind the old barn, the stately elms that have all disappeared now, the pine trees along wind-swept coasts, etc.  There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when were are surrounded by nature.  Just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are-vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth-and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing."

Oh such beautiful musings interwoven in a simple and heartbreaking plot.  

p.s. I also have rekindled my love affair with the Seattle Public Library, and my goodness it feels good to stop purchasing and go back to borrowing.  Use your libraries!!!

There is so much to say, so much I don't want to see in writing, so much I want to birth. I'm beginning with 30-min a day until this poetry books gets finished. I love breaking down big projects into tiny little chew-able pieces, but it's not the scheduling that's the difficult part.  It's all the questions I ask myself about the project that distract me from the purity of art I'm aiming for.  Why am I doing this?  Maybe it is as simple as needing an external deadline to truly push myself into the practice, which will push myself into the poet I know I am inside somewhere.  Maybe it's because I want to have a sense of accomplishment, maybe I want to self-destruct, maybe I want to live for your approval.  

It's true, I've found it hard to put pen to paper lately. Upon the opening of my journal today, Octavia immediately decided to welcome it back by gracing my lap with her presence.  She's missed me writing, too.  I am not sure what it is...something about that stark black line permanently defining that minute, solidifying feelings and people.  I hadn't put two and two together, my recent lack of writing and my recently undefined sense of self, but as is the result of my time with Jess, sipping wine in front of a fire at a historic hotel, I realized their correlation.

For those of you who cannot read my scribble, "Once the moment is gone, the inspiration fleeting, I find it hard to go back and edit my poems.  They are so momentary in nature, meant to store the tone of one particular feeling.  It's as if the muse blindfolds me, then uses my hands.  Later, when I'm more objective and the tone of the moment is no longer, I see that the writing simply isn't as good.  So now, I'm defining a process for myself.  It's time to do the work, remove the blindfold, and see what I'm actually made of."

Currently:

Fear = 72%

Bravado = 23%

Good Poetry =  5%

Goal:

Fear = 20%

Bravado = 20%

(damn) Good Poetry = 60%"

Here's to taking the next step with only the courage of NOW in my pocket, 

Apparently August has come and gone.  The traffic on the bridge can only be explained by the influx of students and parents back to the daily grind.  I've noticed myself looking back a lot these last few days, trying to assimlate new information, new faces, and new feelings into my daily doings.

I believe one of my greatest strengths is in analysis.  Also, as an introvert, my natural tendency is to look back and assess my and others' behaviors and words (read: obsess).  Both of these personality traits combined makes for an anxious aftermath to social events, and I often feel that I severely mirepresented myself, wish I would have not said ___, wish I would have done ___, etc...and suddently, that swift and severe axe of self-judgement comes swinging down upon my head.  Now, I'm bleeding and blind.  I wonder if other people do this?

It reminds me of a year or so ago after a particularly grueling ladies' night.  Lots of wine had us loosed-lipped and  unabashedly weepy.  I remember waking up the next morning not only nursing a nasty headache, but feeling particularly sheepish about my vulnerable behavior and spent a few hours replaying everything I said just in case I needed to apologize to someone.  I desperately wished to go back in time and regain the composure and control I then seemed so eager to rid myself of.  I comforted myself with the notion that the other girls were probably feeling the same way and wrote one of them a letter to that effect, encouraging her not to succumb to false insecurities, to not berate herself for something she may have said,  and to take all parts of the others into her being with willing acceptance, gracious forgiveness, and fierce loyalty.

In the end, there is nothing to do with my analysis of people other than to love them.  This includes myself.  I am human.  You are human.  We can be decidedly virtuous and altruistic. We can be atrociously maleficent and grotesque.  Even the most composed of people have hurt someone else with a flippant, impulsive comment.  Lord knows every single one of us has been hurt by the same.  We can spout off so much of our bull shit and soapbox about our arbitrary opinions that can crush others around us at worst, or (at best) keeps them from sharing their own opinions.  We do not listen well, we do not speak carefully.  We intimidate and dominate and in our eagerness to be known, bulldoze those in our company.

All of this to say that I feel this great need to analyze and obsess and ultimately forgive.  I also feel the need to assure myself of people's affections for me.  But in the end, my acceptance of Candace is what is really in decline.  I could easily demand assurances from others, but I know, oh dears, HOW I KNOW - this is my battle.   It is no one's job but my own to be confident and to trustingly accept people's words at face value without criticism or manipulative self-deprecation.

Speaking of insecurities, I have recently been stopped short by fear.  Many of you know I am working on a humble collection of poems for self-publishing.  I am in the editing stages, and I have to tell someone - the poems are total shit. They are simply not good enough to put out into the world; a world I love, a world of Plath and Rilke and Shakespeare and Donne.  I do not think the world needs another mediocre poet.  For the most part, I am a confident writer and care little about how my work is received (coming from someone who has received only positive feedback, so I realize I am lacking in the character formed by artistic rejection).  Now that I am really looking to put myself out there, fear is taking hold of my throat. I feel it very physcially.

One one hand, the fear makes me pissed and frustrated.  On the other, I see it as a necessary birth pang.  What mother wasn't afraid to give birth?  What artist wasn't terrified to put their canvas on display?  Fear is a right of passage, and I'm beginning to trust its presence and leave it alone.

"Oh hello Fear.  I forgot you were there.  You may go now."

(a small adaptation of Doc Holliday in Tombstone)

I am sick of the portayal of artists and designers and stylists online who chose to convey an overly-white, overly-simple, overly-amiable, overly-clear, and annoyingly overly-painless process to creating.  Even if it sometimes gets muddy for them, it seems they are unable to express the sheer disgusting ugliness that comes from birth.  Have you ever seen a woman deliver a baby?  It's completely violent and gross.  It's also the most naturally beautiful occurance.

What I am saying here is that creating is ugly. I am prepared to work hard on these poems and puke them up and be doubled over in labor pains and fight like holy hell to bring forth that which has been placed inside of me.  I am on the verge of something wanting out and it's gagging me and tearing me and I am not sure I will survive it.  

I've always been more in love with the idea of hard work than with the actuality.  I imagine Plath pouring over her poems in the early morning (Ted got the afternoon to write), blowing on her hands to keep warm in that drafty house in Devon.  I've romanticised the writing life, of course I have.  There is a paradox I possess; two voices battling.  "Work harder. For Hours.  Daily."  Then the other "Enjoy, be less serious, live your art."

Amidst the guilt and the voices saying it wasn't enough, I worked.  Since not much slips my notice, my perpetually-peeled eyes, I consider this a private and profound victory.  Intentionality, I have plenty of.  What's new is the surprise of enjoying the work so much that it feels absolutely nothing at all like work.