One reason I’ve started using a notebook / journal is because I often have trouble keeping my thoughts straight. I don’t think I have some brilliant mind… but, while I try to remain humble, I have gradually fallen in love with the way I think and process… which at times sets off a loop of self-admiration and self-loathing that, without a good sense of humor and a fondness for self-deprecation, would become paralyzing.
Last night before bed, I had a thought that I wanted to explore. I was tired and despite being fairly certain that it would escape me in the morning, took my chances and went to bed. It escaped me. I know at some point I wanted to write about the grace of accepting gifts – a blog post that right now is a title without content (there’s a good TED talk on the subject). For me it ties in to fundraising, learning, relationships, and self-sufficiency. Humbling yourself to allow others to help builds stronger connections when both parties approach the acts of giving and taking as a form of learning and connecting…
That is a post for a different time. And even as I write that sentence, I’m well aware of the jumble that might unfold in the words, sentences, and paragraphs that follow – thank you for bearing with me. I’ll edit, and clean, but if there’s one thing I’ve set out to do with this blog, and failed miserably at, it’s developing the discipline required to fully explore one idea and avoid the tangents that become so many forking paths. Listen closely enough, and long enough, to your thoughts and you realize just how many of them there are. I can tell you that inspiration comes from the book I started this morning and how it has, within a few short pages, made me think about writing, life, childhood, an eerie coincidence of writing, my ex-fiancee’s childhood, Mother’s Day, and the letter I think I need to write to Stephen Dunn.
As part of my morning routine, second cup of coffee, porch, observation of the sky, etc. I brought out a new book to read Walking Light by Stephen Dunn. It’s a memoir style collection of essays on life and writing and poetry. I wish I could tell you when I bought it – the sticker on the back looks like a Barnes & Noble sticker. It has sat on my bookshelf for some time, years, perhaps over a decade. I’ve never cracked it open. Within the first few pages, I felt the urge to write down what I was reading, while simultaneously continue reading. Appropriate to this post and this blog and my own sloppy undisciplined writing Dunn writes, “Suppression of unnecessary impulses civilizes the poem, allows its parts to better cohabit.” My writing is anything but civilized. He continues, “poems should shimmer with a necessity, or otherwise be “holidays of the mind” – romps for the serious, trips to worlds that resemble ours.” I’m reading and saying “yes, right.” One page later he writes “A poet is someone who is constantly liberated and constricted.” Not only have I felt this, but I wanted to share that sentiment with my ex-fiancee, B. As best as I could tell, she frequently walked between the worlds of freedom and constraint – often choosing, gloriously and with grace, freedom.
I can tell I’m going to enjoy this volume. Three pages in and I was writing nuggets down to ponder over or quote. I continued on to the first essay “Stepping Out.” He begins by writing about a short story “The Balek Scales.” A story / fable about oppressive town leaders who own the only scales in town (which are of course rigged). There is a forest which the townspeople are discouraged from entering (inhabited by a giant), and another town beyond the forest. As you can imagine, a brave soul ventures out and discovers the truth and brings the truth back (this is The Cave and lots of other stories). Dunn uses this story to talk about his childhood and the impositions parents and culture and selves necessarily put on children in an effort to keep them safe – all those early guardrails of life. Dunn writes of the story: “it evoked a time when I was constricted and tempted by neighborhood parameters, both real and mythical.” He continues, “Always there were parental admonitions, Don’t go beyond Gorton Street, Don’t hang around with the troublemakers, Don’t accept invitations from strangers, by which I was more or less guided.” As children, we conjure up our own heroes and myths to help make sense of our world. They loom large like the giant in the woods. For me and many of the kids on my street, it was this kid Charles and his older brother Nate. Two older black kids from a pretty run down strip of houses. Charles had super powers. It was said that he once swung so high (playground swings) and then jumped off that he jumped over the concrete playground tubes some thirty feet away. There’s a lot I could unpack there (something for a different time).
As I read Dunn, I also thought about my ex-fiancee, B, and her childhood. She once shared with me the story of how as a toddler she would be playing with a toy telephone when her mother would come to her (either asking her to do something or to join them in a family activity) and B would respond “I busy.” She shared this with me as way to illustrate that from a very young age, she was independent and protective of her alone time. She also told me her parents didn’t push her to go to college and seemed perfectly happy if she would have stayed home (or oddly, her mother suggested she become a flight attendant). This drove her to do her own thing. Coupling those two stories of parental restraint, I wanted to send her this book. I thought about how mother’s day is approaching – a particularly difficult time for her. She always wanted children, but never had any, and her own mother passed away a few years ago. I read and thought about B the independent woman, B the writer, B the mother of her own soul and creativity. She will certainly be thinking of her own mother and probably the time she and her husband were close to adopting a child…. This morning I wanted to send her the book to honor her own nurturing characteristics in hopes that maybe she becomes the writer she wanted to be.
The thought – clumsily expressed above was a moment of reflection plumbed after the fact. It was brief in the moment, and I returned to reading. That’s when it happened again. The poem I’ve been writing in my head – the one composed over the past week and half and a dozen walks through the park by the river was stolen over twenty years ago in this essay, “Stepping Out.” My poem loosely titled “Men Walking” chronicled the shuffle of vagabonds and the long, tall strides of deliberate stretchers out to feel every leg muscle in every stride, the puffed out chest swagger of peacocks on parade. I was hoping, after this kaleidoscope of ambulation, to see how I might walk – capable of all types of different walks, a code-switcher of strides: cute woman, head high; older couple, friendly smile; thinking of the movie of my life, slow and contemplative…. but there it was on the page. “Walking wrong: I had some sense of it as a kid. I tried to cultivate a walk that would give none of the above away.” Dunn had already written it, more or less. I’ve always said, I’m not terribly original.
I read another page or two, but my mind was somewhere else. I was thinking about how Dunn is eighty or eighty-one years old. And while it’s morbid, I imagine he won’t be here too many more years. I began thinking that I should write to him. Thank him? Share with him this strange connection of how I’m finding his observations (so much like my own, but better written) only after I’ve put the time and effort in to my own…. yet his were made many years before.
And that’s where I stopped and began this blog post. The morning now officially underway. With actual tasks I hope to complete – job applications, a run, sending those poems out to me colleagues/friends/mentors. And these ideas unfinished. A gift I’ll never send coupled with thoughts that are meant to be sincere and sweet and deep but often come out wrong and usually stir up opposite sentiments. A letter I might or might not write. A poem that has lost some of it’s swagger and urgency. The desire to read just a few more pages. And what is quickly becoming a lost post about the grace of accepting gifts and help and love from someone else while not feeling a threat to your own pride and self-determination / self-actualization…