Lifting the fog
I knew I wanted some exercise this morning. I also knew I didn’t feel like going to the gym. I immediately thought of a power walk, but it was raining. I looked out the window and saw it was raining steadily, but not pouring. There was no wind. So that is how I came to decide to go for a walk in the rain.
I looped around and around Pier A Park, which juts out into the Hudson River. The Manhattan skyline was mostly shrouded in fog. I put up the hood on my windbreaker and the raindrops made little ping noises on it. Only the diehard runners were out, so the park was quiet and it was easy to get lost in meditation. The more my feet moved, the deeper I went down into myself.
My reward was a big cup of coconut coffee and a date with my journal. Sometimes the stream of consciousness writing that flows off my pen is staggeringly clear and beautiful. That is what I thought as I finished and closed the book.
It seemed my fog, at least, had lifted.
Reading run amok
Some weeks ago I began reading A Return To Love. Suddenly I decided to put it down and pick up The Celestine Prophecy. I can’t really explain why. It just felt like a directive, perhaps related to learning more about the kind of book I’m writing or maybe a need to ingest the Marianne Williamson book in small doses.
Anyway, I’ve now put down The Celestine Prophecy and come back to A Return To Love. This is so unlike me. I’m typically very ordered in my reading. Again, it’s hard to explain why, beyond a strong vibe to be reading Williamson again combined with the fact that James Redfield’s book is not really holding my interest.
In between, I read a short story given to me by Pamela at the senior center. It’s called The Walk and it’s by Jose Donoso. What an intriguing, disturbing little story that is. I wish I had been in the discussion group for that one. From what Pamela tells me, Gabriela, a playwright and opera teacher who is also a member of the center, knew the author in younger days and told some wonderful stories.
Who knows what’s in store this week on the book front. I’ll keep reading Williamson and stay open to other things. And see where it takes me.
Words on paper
I’ve been reading my book manuscript on my commute. It’s a very cool experience, the tactile feel of the paper and my words telling a special kind of story.
It’s amazing how a mere figment of the imagination can become a tangible reality in a matter of a few months. Sometimes I read a section and marvel that I wrote it at all. I haven’t had that feeling since my days in daily journalism. In that world, you often write something on deadline and then let it go until you wake up in the morning and see it in print along with the other 75,000 people in the circulation area. Whoa.
That kind of experience breeds a certain confidence that if the work isn’t top notch on a given day, it might very well be fabulous the following day. It’s a great cure for perfectionism.
So I keep turning the pages of the manuscript, thinking of new directions to take the story, finding things that need to be reworked or expanded. I couldn’t have imagined how accomplished I’d feel at this stage of the process.
Onward …
Senior moments
I’m working at the senior center this week. It’s so funny, exasperating and stimulating all at once. There is the ever fabulous Bertha, the always intellectual Gabriela, the highly efficient Florence and the delightful Pamela. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Yesterday the art teacher, Carol, shared a book with me. It’s called Affirmations For Artists. A sampling:
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. — Oprah Winfrey
It is what we fear that happens to us. — Oscar Wilde
I can hardly wait to see what the senior center has in store for me tomorrow.
Quote happy
Some food for thought that crossed my path today:
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture. — Claude Monet
Why limit yourself to what has never been before?
Why say ‘I can only imagine…’?
Make the dream real, there is no imagination.
– Melissa Etheridge
Permission
Change challenges me today.
It asks me to go with the flow.
But sometimes the flow feels like too rapid a rate for me.
I need to set my pace.
I must.
Truly, it’s OK.
Sylvia
I never turn on the television on Saturday afternoons. I can’t remember the last time I did. Before today, that is. I’m not even sure what made me reach for the remote, except that I had peeled an orange and was perhaps seeking out something mindless while I ate it.
At any rate, I happened on the film Sylvia. It is about the life of poet Sylvia Plath and it stars Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead. I missed the first 20 minutes, a particular pet peeve of mine, but I decided to watch anyway. I’m so glad I did, as I haven’t been this taken with a movie in a long time.
I knew of Plath and of her marriage to poet Ted Hughes. I knew she killed herself. I have read “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” But truly I knew little else about the woman. How very beautiful and sad her story is.
There is a scene where she and Ted are in a boat and they’ve drifted pretty far out to sea. He appears worried as he rows against the tide. She simply looks thoughtful and recalls a day when she tried to drown in the sea. “It didn’t want me,” she says flatly.
This takes place at a time when Ted Hughes is an acclaimed poet and she is trying to write. Day after day she sits at the desk and crumbles up paper, turning to the kitchen and using her creative fervor to bake instead. Ted keeps asking why she isn’t writing. This day in the boat, he tells her she just needs to pick a subject and stay with it. But that just frustrates her. He continues probing and suggesting. Finally he tells her, “Your subject is you.” Ouch. She doesn’t see it, at least not yet. A friend of mine knows why this scene resonates with me so. He and I have played out a similar scenario and I’ve since discovered he is right.
But I digress. Back to Sylvia.
Later in the film, after Ted leaves her, she feels she is finally free despite her love for him and she is writing like crazy. There is a scene where she has just completed “Daddy” and she reads it aloud to a friend. “I really feel like God is speaking through me,” she says when she is finished. I was mesmerized by this, for I am very aligned with the idea that our best art comes through us.
Finally, in talking about the woman Ted takes up with when he leaves her, she is matter of fact. It is her greatest fear come true. “Don’t you understand? I conjured her. If you fear something enough, you can make it happen.”
So wise and so tortured. Brilliant. Flawed. Dead at 30.
I picked up two poetry books from my shelf and immersed myself in the Plath sections for a while, grateful to my orange for getting me there.
Breakfast
At about 8:30 this morning I descended the subway steps. There was a homeless man asleep in an alcove, completely covered in a blanket. Someone had left a shiny apple on the cardboard box that served as his bed.
I wonder how he felt when he woke up and found breakfast.
Knowing for sure
I’ve always enjoyed the essay in the back of each issue of O magazine. Oprah calls it “What I Know for Sure” and it always dispenses lovely wisdom. That’s why I was excited to see a little booklet enclosed in my monthly issue — it’s a compilation of the best of these essays.
I began reading it and this really spoke to me today: Pay attention to what makes you feel energized, connected, stimulated — what gives you your juice. Do what you love, give it back in the form of service, and you will do more than succeed. You will triumph.
I do. I am. I will.
Feeling altruistic
For so much of my life I did virtually no volunteer work. Now I could literally fill my entire week with volunteerism. Crazy, right?
I want to spend time with the senior citizens at the center. I want to do some pro bono life coaching. I want to help build my church into a fabulous force.
It will all happen. Some of it already is.
Now all I need is a sugar daddy 
