The Green Wave

October 29, 2011

I’m the New Poet Laureate!

Filed under: Celebration,Poetry,Spirit — Tags: , , — kate @ 4:01 pm

Yes, the Committee has voted and they have named me:

The Poet Laureate of 188 Island Road!

Who is on this Committee, you ask?

The cats, of course, and a host of chipmunks, mice, snakes, beetles, all the spiders I’ve ever spared, and one red squirrel that lives on the fence.  I’m pretty sure they consulted with the Wind and the proceedings have tell-tale Moon traces all over them.  Birch and pine and apple wove the Laureate crown.

And who nominated you, you may be wondering?

Why, that would be me.

I nominated myself and the Committee voted to confer this great honor upon me and there you are.  Or rather, there I am:  Poet Laureate of my Home.

Let me back way up and tell you something about me.

I was raised to believe I was doing it wrong.  I was trained to mistrust my instincts.  I was instructed to wait for someone – the professor, the doctor, the priest, the Big Important Person – to let me know when it was time for me to speak, to act, to step forwards, to step aside.  Like most people, I was inculcated with the idea that someone else would let me know how I was doing, if I was worthy, and when I was at last acceptable.

Perhaps you were raised with these beliefs, too?  If so, you are certainly not alone.

I was raised to believe I was doing it wrong by people who were raised to believe they were doing it wrong by other people who were raised to believe they were doing it wrong… And back and back and back and back as far back as we can go.  And the thing is, whoever started this thing was Mightily Messed Up!  It’s time to go back there and make a delicious cup of vanilla tea for that person, put our arms around him or her, and sing out all the love and joy in our hearts for that Mightily Misguided One.  And then let’s get busy seeing all the ways we’re doing it right, all the ways our instincts are spot-on, all the ways we just rock!

I see now that the only way to be Poet Laureate of your own Home is to nominate yourself.  My life is about poetry, music, stories, and perhaps more than anything:  Enchantment.  I nominated myself and the Committee – a Committee I hand-picked, mind you, knowing that their cat-food suppers and their webs in the corner relate intimately to my happiness – voted.  It’s that easy.

I’m delighted with my birch-pine-apple crown and all the stars that dance around my pen!

And let me invite YOU, dear reader, to confer upon yourself whatever honor you’ve been craving.

Grammy-Award winner?

Nobel Peace Prize?

Best Dressed?

Homecoming Queen?

Academy Award?

Whatever it is, rig up your own Committee of those who love you (and please include me in the YES-voters), nominate yourself, take the vote, and VOILA!

Wear that crown today!

You look Spectacular, darling!

PS – Please note that I’m not Poet Laureate of the US, Massachusetts, or even of my whole town:  just my own home.  There are other, very glorious poets in my town who may wish to be Poet Laureates of their Homes, too (I’m thinking of you, Joyce), and I figure there are plenty of spiders, chipmunks, and other assorted beasties in this town to vote us all in!

October 7, 2011

A Magnificent Loss

Filed under: Celebration,People,Spirit — kate @ 2:46 pm

My father is dead.

He has been now for six years.  But what does that change, really?

Everything, as it turns out.  What I know about love has been transformed by this magnificent loss.  Magnificent?  How could it be magnificent to lose my beloved father?  I miss him every single day.  But I’ve come to see that even missing him is a privilege.  And feeling his love still so powerfully in my life – more powerfully than ever before – is a miracle, and one that would never have occurred if he were still alive.  If he were still living in the little smoky house by the sea with the angry, helpless woman, I would not understand what I now understand.  Of course, if I could have him back and lose this knowledge, I would.  But it is a merciful truth that such a loss carries such a compensation.

I see him now so differently than I did when we were embroiled in our struggles after he left my mother, my brother, and me.  During those years, I tried everything I could to gain his love.  I perfected my wit, my charm, my thoughtfulness.  I courted him more assiduously than I ever courted a lover.  And sometimes it worked, and he would grant me a smile or an indulgent ear.  Other times, it did not work and there was no smile, no time, no love, no indulgence.  I’d storm away, wrapping my anger like swaddling around the shivering squalling infant hidden within.

This went on for some fifteen years, which is a long time to keep your beak open, begging for a tiny sip of love.  Imagine that posture:  the parched little throat, the pleading eyes.  That was me, dancing, telling jokes, bringing presents, giving compliments, listening for every nuance.  Or not calling, feeling fatherless, rehearsing old stories of abandonment as second-rate payment for his silence and indifference.

In the six months or so before he died, our old family reformed itself around him.  We poured love on him and he drank it in like a thirsty plant.  It was, I think, the first time in his life when he could truly accept our love and return it.  During those long afternoons and evenings in the hospital or the nursing home, during those long hours between treatments and tests, during those long weeks of slowly getting worse, all we had was time.  I look back at those days as among the most painful and joyful of my whole life.  We grew closer and closer even as he slipped further and further away from us.  But at last I had a father.

I was amazed to discover that without deciding to, I had forgiven him everything.  All the old stories and grudges had blown away like mist.  I can’t claim any credit for this.  It simply happened.  During those last months, I came to understand that love is the whole thing, the point, and in fact, all there really is.  All the anger, the hunger, the frustration, the hurt, the sense of abandonment – all of that is only window-dressing, the less lovely colors love wears sometimes.  But it is love all the same.

Our new intimacy did not end with his death.  I am not too fussed over whether that relationship is simply something I have recognized and named for myself or whether it testifies to the soul’s eternal life.  The point is, here he is.  He speaks to me, through me.  Like so many dead people, he makes those precious cameo appearances in my dreams that we all prize so much.  Recently, in one of those gift dreams, he transformed before my very eyes into an enormous, man-sized tiger.  Standing on his hind legs opposite me, he raised a single, scalpel-like claw and split me open from head to toe – and out leapt a joyful black panther:  me!

He is no longer the man who scrapped and scrimped to make a living as a fisherman.  He is no longer the smoker or the man who loved to over-tip a waitress.  He is no longer the man who only occasionally dispensed to me and my brother those too-small doses of love.

No.  He is grown mythic.  He is Tiger.  Fisher-King.  Lord of the Harbor.  He is Odysseus wandering over the Cosmic Sea.  He is certainly, to me, Teacher.  And now I recognize that he was always these things, even when he was alive.  I hadn’t the eyes to see that before, to recognize that mythic shimmer through the blur of my heart-ache.  But now I do.

And the gift of his death is the vision to see that shimmer around the people in my life right now.  If you catch me peering at you, I am just admiring the light you’re emanating.  I am sussing out the mythic gifts you bring with you – and let me assure you that they are more than you could ever know.  You are certainly Teacher to me, but you might also be Child, or Wise Woman, or Poet, or Dervish.  You might be Healer even if your medicine tastes bitter to me.  You might be Path-Finder even if it takes me some time to follow.  I am clever but sometimes slow.  It may take years for me to put a name on what you are offering, but I have faith I’ll manage it sooner or later.

My father is dead, but he has never been more alive to me.  Through this magnificent loss, I see him as he really is, and I see you as you really are:  magnificent.

Kate Chadbourne

7 October 2011

February 17, 2011

Let’s save $103, shall we?

Filed under: Spirit,Writing — Tags: , — kate @ 9:03 pm

I love good ideas.  I love strategies for making life better in a thousand ways.  I love tips and inspirations.  I think this is because I love hope itself.  I love to think that I can keep growing, becoming more skillful in myriad ways, and more attentive to the beauty and meaning all around us.  In short, I love the idea that I can improve.

Of course, there is an entire industry built around this notion, and you can find shelves of it in any bookstore as well as a million pages devoted to it on-line.  Scores of authors step forwards clutching their bouquets of hope, their ten-steps, their three-month programs.  Some of them have credentials, others have life experience, while others have merely a lot of nerve.  It’s a mixed bag, certainly, but I’m all for it.  I pick and choose according to my own fancies, and I listen and learn from many great teachers.

There is a danger in all this self-improvement, though, and that is that you can start to believe that someone, somewhere has an answer you don’t have yourself to one of your most stubborn problems.  Recently I was reading someone’s blog and followed link to link and stumbled across a website that promised to solve procrastination problems once and for all.  Having struggled with procrastination all my life, I was of course intrigued and clicked on the ad to investigate.

What I found was an e-book that guaranteed to bust through even the toughest procrastination.  It hinted broadly at a radically different solution from the hundreds of others out there.  There were testimonies and glowing words.

And a price-tag of $103.

Now, I am a proponent of the “get what you pay for” school.  I believe in paying for quality.  And it is entirely possible that contained in this 120-page e-book  is the Holy Grail for procrastinators (if they’re not too distracted to pick it up).

But gracious.  $103?

It was then I decided that it was time to rely on my own wits – considerable wits they are, too, I’ve recently discovered – and save myself a big bundle of moo-lah.

So, I wondered:  What is the $103 secret to overcoming procrastination?  The author of this e-book said that it wasn’t either of the standard answers:

1. Break down the project into small chunks, schedule them, and make yourself accountable.

2. Buck up, dammit, and just do it!

I have used both of these little tactics to overcome my own procrastination, and I think they work pretty well when it comes to certain tasks like bill-paying or cleaning out the cat box.  However, when it comes to the things that aren’t pressing and which don’t involve bill-collectors or animal welfare agencies, I think another set of instructions might be helpful.  Here’s what I came up with:

Ask yourself:

What are the benefits of doing the task?

What are the repercussions of not doing the task?

How does this task fit into the bigger picture?

It’s often been said that the world does not require us to write books or paint paintings or have creative dreams.  Unless you have a book contract in hand (in which case you can use the two tactics above), no one is breathing down your neck for your finished manuscript.  So it falls to us to decide what’s truly important.  If I send out poems, I stand a chance of being published.  If I don’t, I will remain locked in obscurity.  If I phone the concert organizer, I might make a friend, and at the very least I’ll be proud of myself.  If I don’t, I’ll be home the night of the concert.  Lots of times, it seems to me, the repercussions of not doing a task are stasis and disappointment.  The benefits of doing a task, even when the outcome isn’t what you hoped it would be, are expansion and self-trust.

There is massive work to be done in determining what is really, really ours to do.  Or maybe it’s not really that massive at all if we’re honest.  But it seems to me that one reason I procrastinate is that I’m often overwhelmed.  The most useful thing I’ve ever heard about overwhelm comes from SARK who wrote that overwhelm happens when assign everything the same importance.  Yes!  So it seems that even before we examine the particular task, it’s a good idea to look at the whole enterprise and decide if it’s truly important and if it’s bringing us joy.

And, the clincher:

How will you feel at the end of your life if you let fear or laziness or lack of focus stop you from performing this task?

If the answer is, “Just fine,” then voila:  you’re all set.  If the answer is, “I’ll writhe in pain for eternity,” then it’s time to get cracking.

There’s nothing like eternity for putting things in perspective.  And there’s nothing like $103 for getting me to do my own thinking.

January 28, 2011

Eyes, Hands, Ears, Mind, Heart, Soul

Filed under: Music,People,Pleasures — Tags: , , — kate @ 9:36 am

It’s time to return to The Green Wave.  I’ve missed you!

I promise I haven’t been idle, and I’m practicing my craft and honing my art with as much dedication and pleasure as ever.  I’ve also been teaching a lot and riding the waves of change.

But now, with the light returning and the fresh page of a New Year to write new life upon, I feel the urge to return and explore in this little cyber-sea.  If you’ve been visiting from time to time, only to find an empty mooring, thank you for your visits and your patience.  I’ll see you here now more regularly again.

One of the most wonderful things to happen in the last four months has been the chance to teach my very first music students.  I couldn’t possibly express how exciting it is to watch these musicians discover their own power and ability.  And as a long-time teacher – and one who is perennially fascinated with the question of how to frame, package, present, woo, inveigle, invite, and generally offer skills, ideas, and knowledge – I find I am challenged in new ways that feel exhilarating!  At the same time, I’m led to trust what I really know, and trust that it may well be of use to my students.  That means looking a-fresh at the way I do things and the way I’ve learned, as well as recalling the kinds of experiences I desired when I was first starting out.

I’ve realized that for me, music-making is a holistic endeavor.  Yes, the hands, the ears, and the mind are obviously important – but then, so is the heart, the skin, the soul, the history, the preferences.  When we make music, we call on multiple intelligences simultaneously.  Last week, for instance, I watched as my beloved harp student intuitively chose a better chord than the one I’d taught her.  This one choice was born of a nudging in her ears, her history of listening to songs, her intuition, her hands that leapt a new interval, and even her self-trust and trust in me that trying this new thing was safe and worthwhile.

With both of my students, I’m trying to give what I consider the building-blocks of song-making and song-playing.  I want them to feel they have at their disposal a range of options and choices.  I also want them to feel free to interact with the music, to give it a new inflection, or even new words!

My young one did this with such delight and skill this week.  I taught her the polka, “The Britches” which is sometimes sung with these silly words:

Oh the britches full of stitches, oh the britches, stitches, oh!

Oh the britches full of stitches, oh the britches, stitches, oh!

We decided to fashion new words, and this is what she came up with.

Oh the bucks and does are prancing, oh the bucks and does are good!

Oh the bucks and does are prancing, all around the neighborhood!

Fabulous!

When I look at her, I know that she will never be one of those people who feels compelled to sit on the side-lines of music (or even of life!).  She will always know that music is for her, from her, in her – and that she has plenty to offer and enjoy.  That’s what I want for all of us.

Wherever we are today as musicians, let’s spend awhile in that glorious space of safety, curiosity, self-trust, and pleasure.  That’s where we’re heading anyway, so let’s create it for ourselves today.  And maybe a little prancing is in order, too!

October 23, 2010

Practicing Play

Filed under: Music,Spirit — kate @ 3:29 pm

I’ve thought for some time that one skill that marks the dedicated artist is the ability to divine new ways to expand and to turn that practice into play.

This is true of writers, musicians, dancers, painters, chefs, potters, and creators of every stripe.  All of us reach an edge of ability at some stage and often there is no one there to tell us what to do next.  Our work then is to let our hands, our intuitions, our hearts, and our minds tell us what will move us forwards – AND to let this be sacred, joyful fun.

Lately, when I play piano my hands flip and dive and wheel like a pair of birds.  They want new things.  They teach me new tricks.  I stumble over their ideas but I am exhilarated.  Little by little, the new moves become more natural and I know they can become a part of my repertoire, my “language” for making meaning in sound.

I have always said, since I was a young girl, that anytime I play the piano, my music grows.  That time is never wasted.  Even a rough practice session gives gifts.  And there are blessings in two minutes just as there are in twenty or two hundred.

For you musicians, here are a few things you could play with to open up your language and add a few new phrases:

  • play scales in different rhythms
  • play scales in different directions
  • invent a deliciously discordant scale and play it backwards and forwards
  • play a rhythmic scale with one hand while the other hand plays chords or arpeggios
  • explore the extremes of your instrument:  play the highest notes and the lowest, together and separately
  • invent a rhythmic pattern and intersperse a word or syllable (I tried arpeggios, punctuated by “LEAF”!)

Be zany.  Be free.  Be experimental.  Be unconcerned with success or sounding good.  Yowl a bit if it feels good while you play.

Just play!

September 22, 2010

Staying Afloat

Filed under: Pleasures,Spirit — kate @ 10:34 pm

One way to stay afloat is to remember what you love. Here’s a list I wrote last year and just discovered in a tiny, homemade envelope:

*strawberries*toast*clean sheets
*color*cats*green places
*sun-light, -sets, -rises, heat
*moon-light, – phases,-beams
*words*wit*rain*dancing*kindness* the ability to learn
*frogs*mystery*libraries*paper
*stories*songs*poems
*impulses of generosity
*going to bed early to read
*rising early to write*rivers*the Atlantic
*a good idea*feeling vigorous*June*October*snow
*early leaves*lamplight glimpsed from the street
*picnics*the sound of running water in the woods
*herons & egrets*inspiration from the lives of wonderful writers
*the smell of popcorn*the breakwater*salt air*pine trees*long walks
*carrying a song*the right words at the right time*giddiness*twilight
*Donegal*Honey Crisp apples*eager pianos
*fireflies*honey

(I’ve come to believe that loving the world is a form of intelligence that we can cultivate. And loyalty to the world is a form of love. And you may think I’m crazy, but I swear the world loves us back).

July 25, 2010

Mothers & Thunder

Filed under: Celebration,Music,People,Storytelling — kate @ 12:21 pm

I got to play a concert up in Portland this week as part of Lynne Cullen’s Seanchai Nights series at Bull Feeney’s Pub.  I love that room with its round stage, tall windows, and Irish quotes painted high on the buttery yellow walls.  It seems like the people who come are always ready to sing and to laugh and to dive down into the stories with me.  I love them, and this time was no exception!  I met a great young family with three kids who looked like wizards (the youngest of them is building a harp and learning Gaelic), a bevy of storytellers, an old friend I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years, and a crowd of spirited party girls, among others.  One of my first employers (for baby-sitting, window-washing, and cocktail-party-tray-passing) was also present, and remembered that I used to sit on the hill behind her house and read poetry.

But this visit was made even more special by the appearance of a special guest and her entourage:  my mother and her friends.  They filled an entire long table, and they sang and smiled throughout, and warmed me to the core.  And to see my mother there among them, laughing at my antics and learning to sing those Irish words – well, that is a treasure to me.  This is a rare occurrence.  In fact, it has only happened once before when I hosted a party to celebrate the release of The Harp-Boat.  And yes, even at my age, it matters to me very much that my mother likes what I do, that she sees the value of what I offer.  And that night, she did.

Sometimes, everything goes right.

That blessed night, there was a strapping lad at the bar who gallantly carried the piano up those winding stairs.

The traffic cop softened and tore up the ticket he was writing for me.

The room filled up and every chair hosted someone lovable.

And just at the right moment in one story, just when I said, “She sat up in bed and said, ‘Lord, God, what is that noise?’” the thunder boomed over the sea behind me.  Thunder & lightning as collaborators = amazing!

And my mother came.  Did I mention my mother came?

A wonderful night.  Lucky, grateful, amazed, delighted, inspired me.

July 11, 2010

Thank you, Arthur.

Filed under: People,Spirit — kate @ 12:58 pm

You know, I need mermaids in the world.

I need talking trees.  I need foxes that transform at dusk.  I need enchanted apples.

Though he is wicked, I need Blue Beard.

I require the 13th fairy, meddlesome as she is.

I cannot do without the white deer that flashes through the darkening trees.

Selkies and sea-witches are a necessity.

The moon who recognizes me as a sister and a friend?  Absolutely essential.

And I need company in these requirements, and help seeing my world in its most beloved shapes.

This week, I’ve been reading Amanda Adam’s lovely book, The Mermaid’s Tale.  She’s a wonderful writer and she’s done all of us mermaid-lovers a great service by including reproductions of some of the most splendid fairy-tale art ever created.  There we find Arthur Rackham’s beguiling mermaid, sitting atop what looks like a huge carp while the blue-grey sea boils around her and meteors blaze down behind her.  She is a dangerous beauty, stirring up the storm in her own heart and by extension putting sailors into peril.

I stared at that picture for such a long time, just as I once stared at the sea-witch in my childhood copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales.

The longer I looked, the more I thought, “Thank you, Arthur.”  I felt increasingly grateful that Arthur Rackham bothered to portray what other people would deem so much pish-posh but which I myself find essential.  And the same goes for Edmund Dulac, William Morris, Kay Nielsen, Aubrey Beardsley…  All of these artists looked away from the smokestacks and the scandals, from the drab and the mundane.  They followed their own tastes and visions and loves, and they gave us a world that glows with enchantment, with promise, and yes, with beautiful peril.

The real world.

Yes, friends.  This beauty IS the real world – or a part of it that awaits our gaze.  Yes, smokestacks and drab scenes are part of the world, but while some people insist – yes, insist as though their lives depended on it – that this is the ONLY world, I cannot agree.  There is ugliness and cruelty, but always close by, there is beauty and kindness.

We make the world with our thoughts and especially with our habits of thought.  This week, looking at fairytale art, I felt grateful that Rackham and Dulac and their fellow artists used their thoughts to create a world of singing queens and trooping fairies, of banners flying over castles under twilit skies.

And I realized, almost with a start, that I am doing the same thing.  I am giving voice and space to the real world as I see it when I make a poem or song, when I write my novel or even when I give a lecture and share my loves and enthusiasms, my particular way of making meaning.  As much as I need Arthur and all of his visions, it struck me that someone in this world might require me and my visions.  Just thinking such a thought is like drinking from the Well at the End of the World, feeling all of my strength and courage return.

And friend, that goes for you, too, and for everyone we know.  It’s our world while we live in it.  We are the ones who can stir up the seas and endow every star with a freight of wishes.  We are the ones who can sing, talk, write, meditate on, engage with, summon, enlarge:  beauty, love, truth, honesty, honor, and possibility.

We are making this world, so let’s make it everything we love best.

To enchantment!

June 13, 2010

That Look

Filed under: Irish,Music,People,Spirit — kate @ 1:01 pm

Yesterday I played four mini-concerts of songs & stories for kids at the Worcester Irish Music Festival.  Despite the rain, there were still spirited crowds splashing through the puddles, gathering under the tents, and bellying up to the bars.  Inside the hall, the kids were wild and lovable, ready for stories and dancing.  I gave them a bit of both, telling some of my favorite tales and then, when a few kids could not contain the urge to run, just playing a jig on the whistle and watching with delight as they ran round and round in a circle on the dance-floor.

I love encouraging everyone to sing and so taught a fair number of chorus songs.  One of them was “Soldier, Soldier” – a great song in which the young maid asks the young man to marry her but he protests because he lacks the right clothes for a wedding.  The kids yell out what they think he needs – usually things like “a hat!” or “socks!” but yesterday that included “a visor” (by one little boy wearing, yes, a green visor which he deemed essential equipment) and the crowd favorite:  “Boxers!”

One little girl, Grace, participated in this song-game with a special intensity that I recognized right away.  She watched me like a hawk, she clapped along, she quickly learned the words – ALL of them, too, and not just the choruses – and when I asked her to sing, she jumped in feet-first with a blend of passion and enthusiasm that inflamed my heart with a protective tenderness.  As the Irish say, Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile, “One beetle recognizes another,” and I recognized her:  Singer.

I asked Katie O’Neill, a splendid singer and one of the festival organizers, if she’d noticed Grace.  “Oh, yes,” she said.  “She’s hooked.”

Later, I met her parents and told them what we’d noticed.  They were delighted and proud and not too surprised, which is wonderful.  They really see her, thank heavens, and I bet they’ll give her every chance to do what she loves.

I don’t have children, a choice I’ve thought and re-thought hundreds of times.  Sometimes this choice seems to leave me out of life’s largest motions and movements, its greatest dramas and joys and sorrows.  Sometimes I accuse myself of terrible things because of this – of laziness or cowardice, to name just two things (though I should say that I did try for a time; the trouble is, you can always try harder, take more extreme measures, or adopt, and in the end, I decided against those things).  Other times I feel proud to have stayed true to myself despite the huge weight of general expectations, the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure by well-meaning people, their questioning and bewilderment.

But when I see a girl like Grace taking wing, or any young singer, poet, writer, or creator, I feel that I do have a place in the greater Family.  My job is recognizing “that look” and helping a little to inflame those passions, that self-trust, that questing, beautiful spirit.

In Committed, Liz Gilbert gives childless women a brilliant and self-respecting name, “The Auntie Brigade.”  The Aunties of the world provide those extras that can make a difference – the extra attention, books, time, treats, and love that help young people (and everyone, for that matter!) to thrive.  I love that, and I’d like to go one better and remove the gender filter because this idea pertains to childless men, too (even though they don’t bear the same stigma we do).  After all, the great Merlin didn’t have a son, but he taught Arthur everything he knew about magic.

We seasoned creators are the same, I think.  When we look at a crowd and see the one face that is enraptured, something very essential in us wants to foster that spark.  When we do, even for a moment, even just by recognizing “that look,” we foster it in ourselves all over again.  The living line of singer-to-singer, creator-to-creator is nourished, and we get to witness the great hope of another person coming into her magic.

I’m wishing you a magic life, Grace, and all the pleasure and power of your own magic.  Sing out, Singer!

May 30, 2010

Emily & Eternity

Filed under: Poetry,Spirit,Writing — kate @ 1:24 pm

You’re a busy creator and you spend your days making things (songs, stories, poems, essays…) that fill you with passionate excitement and purpose.  When you wake in the morning, your thoughts fly to your latest projects.  You are eager to get to the piano, the page, the harp, the stage, the laptop, the studio.  When you are away from your creating, when you are trapped in a meeting, when you are passing from one place to another, you can still find the energy of your making within you.  It burns and shimmers and warms you.  It’s the most delicious secret, the most powerful source of fuel, pride, happiness, and hope.

But there are questions sometimes, aren’t there?

In weary or fearful moments, you become susceptible to doubt.  Someone’s voice disturbs the peace in your mind and asks:

Who cares about all this creating?

How much did you earn from that song/story/poem/essay/performance?  Oh!  Only that?

What does all of this creating do for the world?  For you?  For anyone?

Who do you think you are?

And then it sneers:

No one will remember any of this when you die.

This week my dear friend Lauren and I made the pilgrimage out to Amherst to visit the Dickinson Homestead.  We were very fortunate to meet up with an eloquent and knowledgeable young tour-guide who gave us an hour of poetry, humor, inspiration, conjecture, and stories.  We were both deeply moved by her presentation and by Emily’s commitment to her own art.  Emily decided early on that she was a creator, that her greatest pleasure and purpose on earth was thinking and catching the “mint” of inspiration as it fell all around her.  She penned some 2000 poems in her lifetime, and one year, when she was 32, she wrote a poem almost every day.  Despite some discouragement and her own disinclination to market her work for publication, she never wavered in her creating.  She seems also to have had great faith in her own genius and to have seen herself as part of a large and vibrant world of creators.  I loved seeing portraits of two of her heroes, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on her bedroom wall.

And yet, when she died, all of those poems – all of that fiercely and joyfully lived life – nearly vanished into a parlor fire when her relatives found themselves uncertain what to do with her legacy.  In the end, her sister Lavinia prevailed upon their brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, to edit and publish the poems (which was a herculean task, given all the alternatives Emily penned in the margins).  Emily died in 1886 but a complete edition of her work didn’t appear until 1955.  It really is nothing short of a miracle that we know about her, that her work survived, that caring people took an interest and recognized her gift.

Just considering how near we were to NOT knowing Emily, this genius creator, left us both dizzy and somewhat shaken.

And that necessarily raised the question of our own work.  Will any of it endure?  And leaving aside the issue of whether or not it belongs in the same category as Emily’s genius, how do we reconcile ourselves with the great possibility that all of this joyful, busy, intense creating might not survive in this life, much less the eternity that lies beyond it?

I have no easy or comforting answers to these questions.

Neither did Emily, I imagine.  Like us, she created amid immense question marks.  She never knew that she would one day be mentioned in the same breath with the writers she most admired.  She never knew that people all over the world would devour her words, argue over them, find solace in them, feel a kinship with her through them.  She didn’t know that those 2000 poems would live beyond her.

But she wrote them anyway.

And thank heavens that she did!  That’s the central point of all of this:  she DID write them, giving them a chance to survive and to reach us, to strengthen and delight us.  If we are all making this world together – and I truly believe we are – Emily did her part.  She made her peace with eternity by creating in the present.  And even if these poems had been consigned to the flames, she still would have done her part not just for us and for all creators but for herself.  Just that – choosing to spend a life making poems – is a powerful declaration of freedom that reverberates even now.  She spent her days making poems and wisely let eternity take care of itself.

Thank you, Emily.  You help me answer that snide voice:

I don’t have to know where any of this is leading.  I don’t have to be famous or earn high fees or win critical acclaim.  I don’t have to do anything.

But I choose to create today, and I choose to believe that it matters.

And now, back to the shadows with you, sneering one.  I’ve got a poem to write!

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress