A Good Traveler

Ok, it’s time to take a break from the nonsensical, skewed, and bloated world of wedding planning and into a world that seems far more sensible – the world of creativity and writing.

One of my co-workers suggested to me a couple months ago that I look into Stanford’s offerings for creative writing. I was overjoyed to see that Stanford offers a comprehensive and broad range of Continuing Education writing classes (both online and in person) through their Writer’s Studio. I opted for an in person class because Stanford is just 20 minutes from home and I wanted to benefit from the in-person, group dynamic. In June, I joined “Writing Creative Nonfiction” with Caroline Goodwin.

Stanford, near sunset

Let me just say that the program is top notch, accessible to those of us who work full time, without dumbing down for a moment for those of us who are not in an M.F.A. program. I was excited to share space with so many bright, intelligent, creative people from the writing tribe. I learned a lot and my creative juices are flowing again.

I had a 16 page piece workshopped in one of the last classes. I worked hard on the piece but didn’t have time to give it more revised drafts. Instead, I revised as I wrote – not something I recommend because the creating and editing personas are very different and hold very different space in the entire process. But because I recognize that, I don’t think the one contaminated the other. I was pleased with the piece and edited it down from 26 pages.

I was happy with the feedback I received. Our instructor, Caroline, is a remarkable poet. She’s also funny, grounded, and a strong group facilitator. The rules of workshopping are basically to sit quietly while a room of about 20 people discuss your work for thirty minutes. The first portion is devoted to praise, the last portion to offering suggestions for improvement. I received a lot of praise for: the clarity and tightness of the writing, the trajectory of the story, the trust the reader had for the narrator. Some of my classmates happened to be Indian, and appreciated the content and the perspective of an American entering Indian culture. This was meaningful to me specifically because I always try to be careful about my firangi lens and never want to be in a situation of ‘othering’ which requires precision with the word.

Caroline highly recommended the book, The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante. I recently purchased it used at Book Buyers in downtown Mountain View, along with a second copy of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (the first copy is in a basement in Michigan).

For some reason I woke up at 5 AM today and was thinking about poetry, about the role it played in my life for most of my life, and its diminished role nowadays. There was a decade of my life where the only thing I really thought worth living for was poetry. Poetry? Why poetry?! The English word poetry comes from the Greek poie, which means ‘to make’. The Mandarin character for poetry combines the characters for temple and word. Such a beautiful depiction, that I had it tattooed on my body when I was 19. From the Greek solidity of discipline and craft to the Chinese acknowledgement of the sacred, we are given the possibility of life in poetry.

In the beginning was the word

Poetry felt like an old friend the first time I laid eyes on it. I was never intimidated or afraid of poetry. Definitely never bored with it. I was excited to be handed another language to communicate in. Reading Robert Frost in the woods behind my childhood home when I was 10, the slim volume with its blue hardcover is still one of my most precious memories. Seeds of yearning and satiation were planted with each reading.  But then again, I was a girl so highly in love with the written word that anything – a soup can, a cereal box, a TV Guide, was a launching point to somewhere else. I understood then (though I couldn’t verabalize it) that a poetry was a condensed observation or experience. Kind of like a microchip, or DNA, a poem carries huge amounts of essentials in a tiny place. And perhaps because of the art forms longstanding relationship with sacred work, some of it remains a bit arcane and aloof.

Good Medicine

A good poem (like a good love) is both the dog bite and the hair of the dog.

A good poem is like good medicine. It is a concentrated herbal tincture – apply it to any open wound and the flow of blood is staunched.  My Grandmother read “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley when she was a young woman in a time of trial. She passed it on to my father at a needful time in his life. He gave it to me when I was 14. We passed this poem through our family like it was a folk remedy. It cured what ailed us. Sometimes I don’t think I could have gotten through the day without reading it five times. It was like an amulet. It was at that time of adolescent angst that my inherent love for the written word became a need. I started with my Dad’s college textbooks. I found myself taking to this art form and needing more of it.

My scanty few friends throughout high school included an English teacher who was almost 80 years old, and my Aunt C who had an office with many books of poetry and literature. A Tennyson book for my 15th birthday, and I discovered the power of rhyme. Aunt C told me about Carl Sandburg, and his poems in Honey & Salt taught me how to honor a dying love. T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Whitman – all of the classics were next. Reading Sylvia Plath felt like being smothered and I never picked up a book of hers again. Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva came in college, as did Jorge Carrera Andrade and Pablo Neruda, and many, many more.

Approximating the Sacred

Many times I have had the experience of reading a poem, and having it come back to me when I need it later in life. It’s almost a boomerang spell, really. It’s some deep working that makes me understand why Druids were both the poets and priests of their society. Poetry and scripture are very much in the same family, often speaking to the same deep desires of the heart and movements of the soul. The 108 Names of Lord Krishna, The Biblical “Song of Songs”, St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun” – are they poem or prayer? The earliest extant written word is a woman speaking to her god (the priestess Enheduanna’s hymns to Sumerian goddess Inanna).

The Great Pragmatism

But I’ve had the era now of The Great Pragmatism. It stretches from 2004-Present. I don’t read as much poetry as I used to. I certainly don’t write as much poetry as I used to. I used to suffer from princess-in-a-tower syndrome, and before I knew how to take care of myself, and before I knew how to navigate the world, I knew that the only thing I needed was poetry. But not so now. And this has seemed natural to me, because, well, poetry isn’t useful, right? It doesn’t pay the bills – in fact it often makes me long for impossible things. But as poet William Carlos Williams says in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
          yet men die miserably every day
                    for lack
of what is found there.

I’m an earthy person whose poetry can’t just be ambrosia – it has to be daal and beans and potatoes too. Poetry used to be a castle in England, but now it is a red bicycle, a jungle cottage on stilts, an umbrella in the rain. I have to be able to live by it, partcipate in the world with it – not just flee to it. And so the relationship continues to evolve.

I’ve recently developed a penchant for getting lost on Sundays, usually under the guise of finding coffee, or with coffee in hand. Some of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life were found by accident, some folly of road and bad maps (or just sheer boredom) compelling me to take a path never traveled. I have fallen in love with backroads in rural Michigan, Kentucky, and Vermont. I’ve also been terrified, like one pitch black night years ago when I found myself alone and lost without a map or cell phone reception, heading towards New Hampshire, when all I really wanted was to be safe in bed. I’ve driven cross country a couple times, and I know how disorienting those journeys can be. But also, thrilling.

When I was a child of about three, I toddled off into the 100 acres of woods behind our home. This last holdout of wilderness bewitched me. If you asked me, I was not lost. I just wanted to get swallowed up by those trees. I just wanted to follow the path to its end. But to my frantic mother and the search party she rapidly assembled, I was very much lost, and very much at risk. I didn’t get far. Those woods enchanted me from a very young age. As a teen they were the only place I could go to escape a world that had long been domesticated with strip malls and subdivisions.

Of course, good girls don’t get lost. They stay on the delineated path, bordered by manicured hedges or bare, expansive lawns. They don’t peek through the hedgerow, they don’t walk into the woods unattended, and they certainly don’t go out after dark. But I’ve always been a fan of rising above simple directives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and exploring wholly the world I inhabit. It’s not always pretty. Often, instead of cruising in my car with my GPS, I feel like I’m clearing a path through the jungle with a machete and nothing else.

I have a hunch that those of us who have been most lost in life, and who find our way to our respective center or home, know a lot about orientation in general. We know how to navigate. We know what the dangers are; we can smell it in the air. We also know the deep bone satisfaction of coming home, the respite of being welcomed by warm arms and the smell of home cooking. We know the joy of nurturing safe harbors for others. I hope to light a candle in the window of my own heart, a spark of Hestia, of refuge, and comfort.

The interior life especially yields itself well to this give and take of lost and found. These dark nights of the soul where we don’t know who we are or where we are going, and where aid and solace are hard to find. But by cultivating a steadfast curiosity, not only can we become our own best friend*, we can learn not to be so afraid of the unknown. Through trial and error and the wisdom of others who have known it, we can craft a north star that guides and illuminates us on even the most shadowy and arctic of paths.

*Buddhist nun Pema Chodron speaks very well to befriending oneself, and offers very practical tools for this as well.