Tag Archives: safety

Reading Books in the Age of Madness

02 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in art, Attention, competition, frustration, Reading, Uncategorized, Writer's journey

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A few years ago, I sat on a public bench, waiting for a friend and reading a book. A woman interrupted me. (Please note: Do not interrupt a person reading a book!) The woman wanted to know what I was reading. I showed her the cover, and then the woman said she couldn’t read anymore. She used to read. She used to read a lot, but now she can’t. She can’t concentrate. Things have become so unstable lately, so volatile that she can’t concentrate on reading.

“Read,” I told her. “Go read a book. You’ll thank me later.”

After she left I muttered under my breath, “You think it’s hard to read in this environment? You should try writing.”

I know a lot of writers. We plug along. We ride the waves of self doubt and the waves of cultural madness. We have no choice. Being a writer, or an artist, requires a little unplugging. So we unplug. And then we plug back in. And our blood pressure goes through the roof and we unplug again. We write. It’s incredibly selfish of us. It’s incredibly hopeless. And it’s incredibly depressing as we watch the celebrity-titled books fly off the shelves while ours, and those of many authors I know, linger and gather dust.

You want to help the world be less crazy? Support the arts. Support a writer. Buy a book that does not have a flashy familiar face on the cover. And be seen reading it. And then buy another.

 

 

Hurricane

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in hurricanes, natural world, Publication, safety, slowing down, stress, Uncategorized, Working

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Hurricane Florence is bearing down on North Carolina. If you’re reading this you’re likely in the path of it, or at least of a part of it. We all know the drill – get food and water, gas up the car, tighten down the hatches, get ice. It sounds easy when listed like that, but it’s not. There are lines at the grocery stores and the shelves are empty, lines at the gas pump and people cutting in front of you, or bags over the pump handles, the freezer is void of bags of ice, your mind is constantly scanning for what else needs to be done.

Is the patio umbrella down? Should it be brought in? Do we need to take down the porch swing? Is there something I’ve forgotten? Something I’ve forgotten? Something I’ve forgotten? The echo goes on until it’s over. The question can never really be answered.

Twenty-two years ago Hurricane Fran hit NC and came inland. I lived in a cheap apartment in Chapel Hill in an area that was prone to flooding. My neighbors in one apartment moved out in a rush that very night, taking everything they had with them and not cleaning the apartment and digging up the irises they’d planted and taking the bulbs. I made sure I had plenty of food and cat food and candles. I put the legs of my furniture in plastic cups and hoped that if my apartment flooded it wouldn’t rise above the rims.

The hurricane came at night. Neither I nor my cat could sleep. I stood at a window (which was pretty stupid) and watched the trees whip around against the streetlights. Then the electricity went out and everything outside was dark and all I could hear was the wind. Around 2:00 a.m. there was a knock on my door. It was my neighbor Dawn. Water was coming into her apartment. We decided to vacate and see if we could stay in another friend’s place, up the hill from us. But first Dawn needed to move her car. Water was creeping into the lower parking lot. I called my friend and got the wrong number and woke someone up. I put my cat on the refrigerator and told her she could jump up there if need be (as if she needed my permission) and we walked up the hill with our flashlights to Tift’s place. Tift wasn’t home. We walked back and knocked on the second story apartment of another friend, and he said we could stay there through the night. Unbeknownst to Dawn and me there were fallen live wires all over the place during this walk. The wind had died down but it was still raining. We were lucky. It was pure dumb luck. The best kind. Sometimes I think the only kind.

The next day we returned to our apartments to assess the damage. Only a little water in Dawn’s. None in mine. My cat was fine and happy to be let out. The sky was clear. The air smelled like pine from so many snapped trees. The ground was covered in green needles and green leaves.

My first novel was published two weeks later. In the days preceding this event I was living without electricity. One day a neighbor came by to tell me there was a truck with free ice at University Mall. I got in my car and managed to snag a five-pound bag. I made rice and beans for a group of neighbors and gave candles to others. I got fired from a cleaning job because I’d mouthed off when my client complained about Duke Power taking three days to get their electricity back on. I’d said, “It’s an infrastructure. There are crews from other states up here helping us out. Maybe you haven’t noticed but there was a hurricane.”

There’s no moral to this story unless you want to read it as a cautionary tale not to mouth off to a client. But the real point is this – be patient with people. We’re all stressed out. Be patient with yourself too. After going out into the world of commerce, with varying degrees of success and failure, to get ice and gas and another cooler and butane canisters for the little one burner stove I bought after Fran, I forgot to put water in a pot in which I was steaming vegetables last night. I burned the pot. I berated myself for doing this. I don’t usually make such mistakes. “That was stupid,” I said to my husband.

“Yes,” he answered, “but you did a whole lot of smart stuff earlier.”

That was nice.

In the store where I bought the extra cooler, I thanked the clerk and said, “I’ll see you on the other side,” right when he said the same exact thing to me. We smiled and laughed.

Be safe. Be wise. Be patient. I’ll see you on the other side.

Holding Onto a Young Heart

26 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in confidence, emotional safety, heart, safety, self, youth

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I am at an age where I look back on my younger self with great tenderness. I wonder what happened so early in my childhood that my confidence-slate was completely wiped cleaned. There are of course institutions and people to blame: parents, adults, church, school, advertising, TV, other children, teachers, etc. etc. etc. We’ve all suffered something.

What happened to my confidence was no one person’s fault. It was a system, a tsunami of cultural messaging that I couldn’t untangle from, that wrapped its tendrils around my feet with every step I took, that pulled me backwards, or down, or away from expressing my own heart. I knew my heart, but I could not speak it without experiencing ridicule, or arguments, or someone denying its truth. As a result, I became an extremely silent child, a child afraid of being wrong, a child afraid she was wrong. A child who felt stupid, and bored, and who retreated into herself more and more as time went on.

I loved the woods. In the woods no one asked me to point out Taiwan on a world map, and no one asked me to recite multiplication tables, and no one asked me to give my life to Jesus. In the woods I could trust something. I could trust the woods. I could trust myself.

I used to fantasize about living in a cave – a furnished cave with a bed, and rugs, and a cat, and books. But what would I eat? I wondered. Cereal would be good, I thought. I could sneak back home and steal boxes of cereal. But I’d need milk. How would I keep the milk from spoiling? In the end, it was the lack of refrigeration, not the lack of a good cave, that kept me stayed put.

I stayed with my family and I stayed in school and I became a teenager with the usual teenage concerns. One day a boy said to me, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

“I guess not,” I answered, taking in what I perceived as criticism.

“It kind of pisses me off,” the boy said.

So it was criticism.

I talk now. I’m 64 years old and I’m a novelist and I can carry on a conversation with a stranger and I have a public life. Some days I wake up a little panicked over this. I always wanted to be a writer. When I was a child I knew that books were written by writers, but I noticed that I didn’t know anything about the writers themselves. If I ever saw a picture of a writer it was on the book jacket. Becoming a writer seemed perfect for me. I could present a book, but not be seen. Well, things changed, and here I am, a writer with a public life. It’s not bad though. It’s helped me gain some confidence, but I sure didn’t start out with it.

So these days, I look back on that child, the child I was, the child with her confidence-slate wiped clean and I look at who I am now, and I see that tender skinny child with the long, gangly legs and the soft hair on my young arms, the arms that I never raised in school when a teacher asked a question, and with which I hugged myself down in the woods. I see that young girl trying to please everyone by not existing, and not speaking her heart, and I feel sympathy for her and I also feel a smidge of pride, because I know that while she did not speak her heart, she did hold onto it.

 

Information Overload

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in art, Attention, creating, emotional safety, natural world, Observation, Process, Reading, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writing Advice

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Every day each human being on earth processes or filters immeasurable amounts of information. Some of this information comes from the media: our televisions, newspapers, radios, internet, podcasts, etc. etc. etc. Some comes from books. And some comes from the natural world. What do you pay attention to? What do you ignore? And what do you count as information?

I count all media as a form of information. I think there is a difference between information and knowledge, and I think there is also a difference between knowledge and wisdom.

I include under the category of media all TV shows and advertising. In fact these might be the most insidious forms of information because we absorb them and as we absorb they inform us of how life is supposed to be lived. As a child I didn’t question these things. Life was white and middle-class. Mothers enjoyed housework. Fathers enjoyed coming home to find dinner on the table. Children went to their parents for advice. There was no problem that could not be solved in thirty minutes. We all worshiped the same god. I absorbed all this from TV and advertising, because it was all that I saw. The world of television seemed more real than my own world, but I found something different in the woods behind our house.

This was where I went to escape and to be alone and to read and build forts. As a child I didn’t understand how fortunate I was to have a safe natural area right in my backyard. I didn’t know that many people did not have such a refuge.

In the woods I absorbed different sorts of information. I absorbed smells and observed crayfish and bugs and frogs. I invented games and people and made up stories which I acted out. I met my writer self down in the woods. I met my intuition. I learned to listen to a quieter sort of information than what the media delivered. Or what I heard in school. In the woods things made more sense than in the world of television or people. I’m grateful that I had access to that safe space, grateful for the filter the natural world gave me to sort through the offerings of the human world. The human world was chaotic to me.

That information gained in the woods is still there. That intuition. That ability to find patterns. I’ve lived my life ignoring a great deal of the information that comes from the sources that scream at me the loudest. I believe it is the path of a writer to listen and to sort and to not be led like a sheep by the many voices. I believe it is the path of a writer to be careful regarding the intake. Taking care with intake is the first step to taking care of what we can offer. Offer your best. Best in, best out. It’s as simple as that.

Holding Space for Yourself

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in comparison, competition, creating, creativity, emotional safety, Process, prompt writing, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writer's journey

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In teaching, one of the things I try to do is hold space. In my private prompts classes, we close our eyes and take some deep breaths and get quiet, letting the workweek fall away, the effort that went into getting the kids off the school, the traffic we drove through to reach our destination, all the little niggling energy that we carry with us to the next place. My studio, where I teach my private classes, has, over time, taken on a lot of creative energy from my work there, and the work of others. The space supports our creative endeavors, and the work of holding space is made easier by this concentrated energy. But the energy in my public classes is also concentrated, and held collectively.

The class I teach regularly, for free and open to the public is called Prompt Writing. I teach it in a book store, and here I have a different ritual for opening the space. I ask each person to say their name, and give one or two sentences about their writing practice, and in this way we settle into each other.

I then introduce myself and tell the class what we’re going to do, I give the prompt and we write. There are rules for responding to others’ writing when it’s read out loud, and they are rules I believe in, so I try to enforce them gently, but firmly, and consistently. I do not waver from these rules.

The rules are meant to create a safe space for writers. It’s important. This is what is meant by holding space. Holding space is holding safe space, and there are lots of different ways to do it, and lots of different ways to not do it, or to undo it.

Competition is anti-safe-space holding. Overly critical thinking and analyses also. Hierarchy. Self-promotion. Comparison. Trying to fix something for someone, be it their writing or their life. Sometimes asking digging, probing questions can make a person feel challenged and defended instead of heard.

Recently I have been thinking about how powerful this is, and how I might try the same techniques for myself. In other words, when I am feeling low and anxious, perhaps I could recognize that I need something that’s not being provided and try to provide it. I might try to hold space for myself.

I don’t think it would be any different than holding space for others. The first step would be to get quiet, and the second step would be to create a safe environment for myself. One without competition, without over-thinking, without hierarchy, without self-promotion, without comparison, without trying to fix it, without digging at myself. In fact, when I need to hold space for myself, it’s always because I have let these things in. It’s natural that they should creep in. We live in a world of low thoughts. The trick is to see it, and to say no to it, and to open the space for yourself again.