M. Elisabeth Norton (American, active 1890s), The Bookman: March, 1895. Lithograph, Portland Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Bergsvik and Donald Hastler.
March is a month of transition in the Midwest. Snow, sleet, hail, wind. Temperatures at the freezing mark. Temperatures at 40 degrees. Five feet of snow on the ground. Fresh buds on the willow. March can be a time of transition from body to spirit; maybe you have experienced the loss of loved ones in March. Is there anything about March that motivates or inspires you?
I find inspiration for writing through art. I stumbled on the work of M. Elisabeth Norton this morning while researching lithography. She has a bold graphic style common to the advertising of the 1890s. The Bookman was an illustrated monthly literary journal and one of the first to publish what came to be known as the best-seller list, a driving force in shaping discussion around popular literature. Books that appeared on these lists became best sellers because the lists said they were. (Is the same true today?)
It’s March in Minnesota. Astrologically, it’s a powerful month because Pluto is moving into Aquarius (for the first time since 2008 and will be retrograding in and out of Aquarius until 2044). What does March mean to you? How does it smell when you walk. Is it a warm breeze that hits your skin or an arctic blast. Is the sidewalk muddy, snowy, or are you jumping over puddles of rain.
The Writing Topic is March. If you purchase Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones Deck, you’ll read that she prefers Writing Topic to prompt. Here’s what she says:
I’ve always used the word topic instead of prompt. Prompt is a starting place but topic indicates more the idea of plunging in and immersing. Why write with topics?
A topic that has at least two levels can open more directions in your writing.
Sometimes a blunt topic can spring the mind into a full-out sprint.
Topics can be used as beginning points, for the mind to push off from.
You can also use a topic to move slantwise into a subject.
Practicing with topics leads you to your own true writing territory.
Dig into March. You can drop your Writing Practice into the comments below. Or jot them into your notebook. Still writing pen to paper? Or is all your practice on the computer. I do both. No matter your style, keep writing.
NOTE FROM QUOINMONKEY: Natalie Goldberg (along with Billy Collins, Sensei Kaz Tanahashi, Roshi Joan Halifax, Dorotea Mendoza, MH Rubin, and Lorraine A. Padden) will be teaching at the haiku workshop The Way of Haiku: Winter at Our Back, Facing the Edge of Spring at Upaya Zen Center this weekend. Liz and I attended the haiku workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico in person at Upaya in early February 2020 (our last travel before the pandemic) and have joined every year since on Zoom. We continue to find inspiration, structure, and guidance in Natalie’s teachings, from her latest book Three Simple Lines, and in the dharma talks at Upaya. To our teachers and mentors, much gratitude.
The new moon peaks in Aries this morning. Woke up heavy, but airborne. Like the feel of this photograph. Pelicans are so prehistoric looking. On one of our drives through North Dakota, Liz and I saw a glacial lake surrounded by hundreds of pelicans. That’s the first time I realized migratory white pelicans make North Dakota their home from April to October. A North Dakota wildlife refuge hosts the world’s largest colony of breeding white pelicans.
The pelican in the photo is most likely the common brown, a year-round resident in Florida. Or it could be an ancestor of the American white pelicans we saw years ago in North Dakota after the migration to southern shores for the winter. Long distances are traveled for survival and discovery. New perspectives. And sometimes a leap of faith.
⇒Cancer New Moon in Aries
What is your calling? What makes your blood roar in your veins and inspires you the most? For some of us, it’s as clear as choosing a career that makes us happy. For others, it’s parenthood or perhaps offering the world your selfless service. We all have a ‘thing,’ and this New Moon illuminates the potential to start over. In Aries, it’s all about being brave and bold enough to step into the light. At first – for these next several months – you may feel a little disorientated and unsure of where you’re supposed to be going. Yet, with faith and determined action, you’ll soon find your feet. Sometimes, all it takes is one leap of faith and the ability to discern what you truly, deeply desire. Perhaps that’s where you’ve felt confused lately, but it’s time to put that to the side and assert your needs.
Liz unpacks the spiral shells out of a plastic peroxide bottle with the top slit open to form a hinge. Amy carefully packed them for us before we left St. Joe Beach. Shells, the bones of the sea. Skeletons made of calcium, color revealing the nutrients they ate. Shells scattered on the beaches we visited in the panhandle. Sand dollars washed up at Crooked Beach. You had to wade into the water at first to spot the good ones. Later you trained your eyes to pluck them from wet sand. “It’s like Neptune,” Liz said. “The wave rolls in, all foamy and murky. When the wave washes out, for a moment, everything is clear. That’s when you find your prize.” The translucent jingle shells appeared on Windmark and tiny coquina shells. Surf clams, cat’s paws, and limpets with holes in them on St. Joe. Protection for the soft insides that live outside in the ocean. No backbones.
Backbone. We say those with backbone are strong, can pull their weight in a crisis. I’m not good in a crisis. I don’t pivot quickly. But Liz does. In chaotic situations, she will grab my hand, say, “I got cha” and weave her way to safety. Many of my friends react to danger in quick response. I am a person that sniffs out danger from a distance. Empathic. I sense energy around and don’t move into spaces that feel toxic. It’s a different way of sensing the world, moving through air, paying attention to earth. Taurus. Moon.
But what I really want to say is that it’s good to be home from the ocean. To be back in the Midwest. At least for a time. The ocean is constantly moving. The 40 mph wind gusts and driving rain against the beach house last weekend, nowhere near the category five of Michael a few years ago. So much did not survive. So many homes and trees destroyed, people living five years later in RVs on their land under carports. They have not rebuilt.
But people are resilient. A better word is flexible. Resilience is the fortitude to will your way back to the way things once were. That’s often not possible. Not after a hurricane. Not after a tornado. Not after a pandemic. Or an earthquake. Or war. So much suffering in this world. Flexibility is the ability to change. To flow into what is new and unfamiliar. Adapting to a world around you that is ever changing. I used to hate change. Too unpredictable, unfamiliar, disorienting. Now I try to embrace it, learning from the people around me. Some thrive on change. They are at their best when things are new and in flux. I am more of a reflector, like the Moon.
15-minute Writing Practice on Shells, written on an old iPad Mini 4, Saturday, February 18th, 2023
It’s an adjustment returning home from Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida after three weeks away. The harsh environment of a Minnesota winter slaps the face in a different way. Living in the Midwest since 1984 has hardened me to the colder months. There is a certain pride in the flexibility and resilience it takes to survive our winters.
It was easier in younger years. But this year, there have been so many gray days. And walking the beach every day in the Florida panhandle, feeling the sun on my face, bare feet on the ground, hit me in a new way. I can see why we ran into so many Minnesotans in February in Florida. And why many of my Northern friends spend part or all of their winters South.
It’s quiet in our apartment today. Liz went back to work. And me, well, I no longer have to drive to a day job anymore. I’m building new structures that will hold me and our relationship. I am fortunate to have that choice. I’m grateful every day for the time I have left. I dreamed last night in the colors of the creative. Of churning waters turned to glass, and portraits transformed into books. Of ancestors and teachers still living, showing me the way. I hope I listen to the messages and learn the skills they are trying to teach me. In this life, this human life, it’s important to listen.
Thinking of my Grandma, who left us 24 years ago today. Hard to believe she has been gone for so much of my adult life. I spent so much time at her house in the summers as a kid. Growing up in a large family in a home where my Mom’s attention and time was always shared among siblings and 15 or more daycare kids, having my Grandma’s undivided attention during those long summer days was a luxury. And she was quick to spoil me! Later in my life, she suffered a debilitating stroke and lost her ability to walk and speak. And then she taught me how to be a caregiver, how to honor commitment, and how many ways there are to communicate without the use of words. For seven years she lived in a body that no longer worked like it once had, with a sharp mind but an inability to do needlework or sell Avon or host big family dinners. During those years she taught me how to accept challenges with grace. She never complained and she never felt sorry for herself despite losing the ability to speak and walk and do so many things that brought her great joy. She continued to love popcorn and Hallmark movies, Jeopardy, Christmas lights, babies, and chili over rice. After my Grandpa died, Dawn and I would take her from Saint Paul to her home in Chippewa Falls, WI on the weekends making countless journeys down 94 in all kinds of weather, her wheelchair and her commode stuffed into our tiny Honda Accord, with Grandma carefully lifted in place into the front seat, tapping her head along to the radio as we sped down the dark interstate on Friday nights. Now I am the age she was when she’d welcome me with open arms at the start of the summer and reluctantly let me go back home when my Mom called and said the gig was up and it was time for me to return to Saint Paul. I am a better person for being loved and cherished by my Grandma Doris, and I will always be grateful for her presence in my life.
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About Amy: Amy S. Gabriel is a fourth generation East Sider who lives with her wife of over 30 years on the same street in Saint Paul where at least one Gabriel family has resided for multiple generations. Amy is currently one of three Gabriel households living on that street, located very close to Phalen Lake Regional Park, making it convenient for daily walks with her camera.
Amy is a graduate of St. Catherine University, where she majored in English and Theology and fulfilled her art requirement with a black and white photography class that included unlimited access to the darkroom. When she is not behind the lens of her camera, Amy can be found in her Saint Paul studio on Como Avenue working on her latest tie dye creation, which is her other great artistic passion in life. Amy enjoys road trips, reading, breaking bread with family and friends, and maintaining a daily practice of writing at least 750 words which she began in August 2014. View more of her art work at Recorder of Wonder Photography.
I was writing in my dreams last night. I kept waking up in the middle of writing. One was about moving. When you move you go through every shred of material possession that you own. Laptops of writing. Old photographs. Notebooks of Writing Practice. Volumes! Old aprons that my grandmother Elise wore in the sixties. When you move you sift through journals and boxes of family photos your mom left you. You wear her jewelry and decide — which should I keep? Which to let go? There are dishes and tea sets and bone china. Liz asked if we could stop in Cody to pick up a blue rocker her mom wanted her to have after she died. I said, “Yes, and I have my great great grandmother’s white wicker rocker stored at my brother’s and an antique tea cart I want to put plants on after we move.” Think of everything those rockers and tea cart have seen over their lives.
When you move, you decide what matters to you at this juncture in your life. At 30, 40, 50, 68. The same things that meant something at 22 do not matter now. When I was 21, I left for Montana with a canvas backpack and $200. What things will I move to Montana next year? What will I carry on my virtual back? I have the same adventurous spirit — tempered by time and more caution about falling. Everyone around me seems to be falling and breaking bones. I tripped on the cement at work a few years ago and almost cracked my head. I was alone on the dock. On one was watching. It scared me enough to instill caution.
A cautionary tale. Wasn’t that the name of a book or song? It’s funny the connections the brain synapses make. A thousand lightning snaps all dependent on the single beat of a heart. When I move I want to take this writing chair and maybe this notebook. Recall. I will need to read this again.
Roots that bind. Binding roots. I came home from work last week to find an empty yellow pot on the marble island. “Look,” Liz said, “I transplanted the rushfoil. It was so rootbound, the roots at the bottom became one with the pot.” I peered into the spiral chasm. “Hmmmmm. That’s kind of cool,” my lips said. My heart translated the fused tendrils as a metaphor for my earthbound feet stuck to unforgiving skeletal bones. Heavy and unmoving. Same old job. Same old routines.
But all that is changing.
The supervisor at work (only a few months into the position) seems to see us as baggage on his journey through the company’s future. Monday when he wagged his finger at me, I pulled him aside and told him to stop treating us like robots, to cease micromanaging a team that has been efficient and exceeding our corporate goals for a decade. To stop silencing us and treating us like neophytes. He is not rooted to the way things were; he comes from another division. He moves like lightening. He makes mistakes, but he doesn’t care. Forward, at all costs.
For a team who pauses and pays attention to details, it’s maddening. Unnecessary. There are compromises that have to be made in the spaces between the 7000 steps I walk at work every day.
I retire from corporate employment at the end of the year. Next spring we rip 38 years of roots out of the bottom of our Minnesota home and transplant them to the mountains. Liz told me she had to grab a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and scrape at the sides of the clay pot to get those roots to budge. And still….the remainders are part of the clay. The croton (rushfoil is the common name) was a gift from a coworker after my dad died in 2017. She has sprouted new buds in a 13-inch frost green pot butted up to our north facing windows. She is happy. Thriving. I transformed the worn pot into photo art. Another metaphor? On the day of my solar return, I feel scratchy and unsettled.
I didn’t know what I wanted to write about this afternoon. It’s Friday, the day I set aside for creative work. I’ve been lax in completing any kind of art. I’ve been culling, gathering, harvesting. Languishing while the mighty Ceres swings her scythe against the grain. I have filled countless journals with sketches and writing practices. I don’t know the end result. I do not know where I’m going. I envy artists and writers with completed bodies of work. They inspire me.
I’m reading the Three Tenets for a writing workshop this weekend. We’ll be doing two days of Writing Practice and a lot of sitting meditation. When I scribbled the daily schedule into my calendar, I could feel the resistance. I’m rereading The True Secret of Writing. I’m a few chapters into Standing at the Edge by Joan Halifax; this morning I read her blog piece Rites of Passage and the Three Tenets.
In the right light
In the right time
Everything is extraordinary.
-Aaron Rose
We all stand at the edge at some point in our lives. That place of not knowing. I’m standing at the edge of letting go of a day job I’ve held for 13 years. The edge of a geo-move next June when Liz and I pack up all of our worldly possessions and move to Montana for a year-long creative retreat. We have no idea what happens after that. It’s uncharted territory — leaving the familiar behind, cutting away the old. After nearly four decades of living in an urban Twin Cities landscape formed by glacial lakes, our new roots will break ground in the rural, more isolated and dry Bitterroot Mountain valley in western Montana.
Not knowing is letting go of preconceived notions of who I think I am and who I believe others to be. No attachments. It might look like it takes courage, but what choice do we have? Everyone tangles with birth and death. And all the messiness in between. We have little control. We are faced with choices each day for new direction. What do we choose?
We stopped at Noon for a webinar by Out of Chicago on A-Ha Moments in Flower & Plant Photography. Nine photographers spoke about the process and joy of photographing some of their favorite macro images. Grounding. Inspiring. Earthy. Perfect for the shift of Mercury into Cancer and a happy place for my Taurus Moon and Taurus rising. It’s the little things. A photograph. One footstep into Eloise Butler Wildlife Garden & Bird Sanctuary. To not know is to reconnect to the wild.
A few reminders from the photographers at the A-Ha Moments webinar:
Take your shoes off. Go barefoot when photographing the wild.
Details matter. Commit to work the scene. Experiment.
Never give up on your vision.
Pay attention to what turns your head.
Spend time on what you love. Let yourself be taken.
In the right light, in the right time, everything is extraordinary. -Aaron Rose
The walk along Boone Avenue skirts the edge of Northwood Lake, a shallow 15-acre section of the North Branch of Bassett Creek. I drive home from work through busy Twin Cities suburbs to avoid rush hour traffic. Liz moves the opposite direction down Boone on her daily walks. We meet in the middle. Last Wednesday I spotted her orange neon Nikes, index finger high to the sky, jousting the wind. I pulled over. “Do you see it, do you see it?” she said. “You’ve got to get out?!”
I put my hand up to visor my eyes. The raptor soared on the thermals, dipped over two great blue herons nesting in cattails, swooped above a pair of loons in the middle of the lake, glided over our heads, and rose again. Finally, her yellow eyes spotted her prey. We watched as she jettisoned underwater, talons first, splashed lean like an Olympic diver, arose with dinner, and flew away. In all the time we have lived here, this is the first we have spotted an osprey on Northwood Lake.
Osprey dive for fish from heights of 30 to 120 feet, plunging feet first, submerging their entire bodies beneath the water. Airborne again, they reposition the fish for streamlined transport so that the head faces forward. While underwater they close their third eyelid which acts like goggles to help them see clearly. Pairs return to the same nest year after year, each contributing to the structure of their home, much like we have during the pandemic. Raptors bring us great joy on our daily walks. Yet they are susceptible to a virus in the wild – the highly pathogenic avian flu (HPAI).
The answer is yes. I have enjoyed my life. But in the underbelly, I have thought long and hard the last few years about the reality of death. Pandemics. Viruses. Wars. Age. So many lost. My mother died in hospice at my brother’s a year ago in April. By some miracle, vaccinations had become available and we road tripped to Pennsylvania to spend her last weeks on Earth with her. She continues to teach us even in death.
Lineage – Root Teachers
The day of the osprey fell in the first week of whittling my job down to 32 hours, Fridays off. At the end of the year, I will no longer work my day job. In celebration, Liz presented me with a package, a surprise gift to mark new beginnings. We sat in Veronica, my aging 2006 red Mini-Cooper, windows open to spring. Liz smiled and slid a haiku book out from under her windbreaker — Diane di Prima. The 1967 version is a handprinted collaboration with her friend, artist George Herms. Each page presents like haiga. The cherry woodblock illustrations by George were originally printed on a cleaned up rusty press from the Topanga Playhouse that later became LOVE Press. He used an individual color for each print on Mohawk Superfine Eggshell White paper. I now own one of a thousand of the first bound editions of Haiku issued in 2019, commemorating the 50th anniversary.
The second gift from Liz was a set of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones Deck, a 2021 extension of her 1986 classic, Writing Down the Bones. (Have you enjoyed your life? is Card 51.)
The last time I saw Natalie in person was at a haiku workshop in Santa Fe at Upaya Zen Center in February 2020. I was able to briefly connect when we sat down at lunch. I told tell her how grateful I am for everything she has taught me. It’s a gift to have had the opportunity to see her again. On the layover flight back through Salt Lake City, I noticed one lone man wearing a surgical mask, a precursor of what was to come.
By March 2020, everything in Minnesota shut down. So much has happened in between. I worked in the field through the pandemic, where we masked every day and built nuts to bolts machines that filled vaccine bottles. Liz worked from home. We signed up for Zoom and joined Upaya as members. In 2022, Natalie co-taught a Upaya haiku workshop on Zoom where she read Diane di Prima’s haiku. We continue to know Roshi Joan Halifax and the Upaya community in virtual ways unimaginable two years ago. Our gratitude is boundless.
Life – Planting Seeds
The snake plant in the lead photograph was given to my mother Amelia Ernestine by my grandmother Della Elise in 1966 when our family moved from Georgia to Pennsylvania. When my mom died in April 2021, my sister Cassandra (named after great Aunt Cassie) and I split the plant in two. One half road tripped back to Minnesota with me; I named her Georgia. The other half my sister named Belvedere; she put down roots in an antique teapot on Cassandra’s kitchen window sill in Pennsylvania.
Georgia’s leaves stand tall against our north facing windows. She has seen some things, heard some things, traveled around the country. She is rooted to our family and has lived a long and joyful life. Twenty, thirty, forty years moves at light speed. We don’t know when our time will arrive. On my deathbed, I want to say I loved my life with its pitfalls and craters. I dig deep and look to the ancestors to show me the way.
-Written the weekend of the Taurus New Moon in a Partial Solar Eclipse, April 2022
I meant to do better. To take more Polaroids, roll more clay, shut up and write. But 2020 had other ideas. For my birthday in high summer, Liz gave me a new deck of cards — The Wild Unknown – Archetypes by Kim Krans. The art was created from the center of a dark night of the soul. I pull a card a week. Saturday, August 15th landed me in The Bardo. I was already there. What changed is my willingness to straddle the abyss, to sit in uncomfortable places — in this life and what I imagine to be the next.
In this life, a family member is recovering from COVID-19. Two long time friends are in treatment for cancer, maybe the fight of their lives. Two other friends buried their 6-month old kitten, lost to a disease of unknown origin. In this life, babies are born unseen by grandparents, couples are married on Zoom, people die unable to hold a loved one’s hand. In this life, cities explode, humans rumble and rattle, tired of gridlock, tired of the status quo.
In this life, last night we locked ourselves in the bathroom to the howls of tornado sirens and horizontal rain. In this life, we wear masks, cancel our travel plans, stack bookshelves to the top of 9-foot ceilings, rearrange our studio to hold Liz’s work-at-home office next to old Kodachrome slides and boxes of art supplies.
I am digging in. And expanding out. I am rattling old bones. Untangling ancient root systems. Beliefs are not truths. I am learning that denial is a form of grief. It’s not the Thing that is dead, but how I’ve been doing the Thing. Shine your light, luminous or liminal. That is the Leo energy of August 2020 (from Lindsay Mack’s August podcast, Tarot for the Wild Soul).
I meant to do better. Prayer flags wave against an overflow bookshelf above photographs of my great, great grandparents. I research the goddess Eris, sister of Ares, daughter of Night. I listen to old astrology tapes, a choir hymn hummed through face masks, the tingle of ghost chimes.
In the Bardo:
We may receive messages from those who are no longer with us or see visions of lives not yet lived. In the Bardo there is the potential to forgive the unforgivable, to say the unsaid, to see the unseen, to love the unloved, to let go of all the things that cause us pain. The Bardo suspends us in its spaciousness for just long enough to open us to higher wisdom. Its energy does not belong to the Earth as we know it, but rather to the Cosmic network of which we are a single thread.
We sojourned to The Book House in Dinkytown last weekend to pick up A House By Itself, a small book Liz had put on hold after we signed up for a winter haiku retreat. While browsing in the small rectangle of a poetry corner, I ran across Peonies Kana, Haiku By The Upasaka Shiki. On the cover is a black and white photograph of Shiki sitting on the engawa of his house near Ueno. The thin tome written in 1972 was placed unobtrusively between Anne Sexton (transformations) and Leslie Marmon Silko (The Delicacy and Strength of Lace).
After telling Liz we were out of space on our bookshelves, I ended up buying them all. And spent the last few days reading the details of the short life of Masaoka Shiki, a poet I didn’t know much about until now. I grabbed a medium Moleskine for my work bag and a small pocket Field Notes for my haiku practice. The first day of 2020 is off to a good start. The Book House is well organized with a wide selection of books. Next time we’ll plug the meter for two hours instead of one!
On Winter Solstice, after two years of dormancy and a flirt with death, the orchid bloomed. The Pacific Sunspots was a gift from Liz on a birthday that crossed decades. I remember opening the wrapper on the deck of Indria, our little cottage. We have moved into an apartment now, simplified our lives. The blooms fill me with joy.
But I have grown lax in my practices. We had been toying with the idea of meeting friends in Santa Fe this winter and signing up for a haiku retreat at Upaya Zen Center. On Christmas Eve, all the pieces came together. Plane tickets were reasonable and there were still openings. Liz and I texted our friends who were driving home from Christmas Eve dinner. We booked our flights and registered — we three were the last to sign up before the retreat was marked Full. The hair stood up on the back of our necks.
On the day after Christmas (at the New Moon Solar Eclipse), I juggled bins in the studio to try to set up a workable writing space. One old box was full of practice notebooks from Taos writing retreats. I pulled one off the top. It was marked October/December of 2006. The detail was mesmerizing; I had forgotten all the insecurities that surface in silence. It can be painful to sit with yourself.
There was a color photograph tucked into a card of a wintry gate near the pigeon roost at Mabel’s. I studied the faces of Natalie, Maria, and the 21 people who attended the four-season Intensive that year. Some have become teachers and grandparents, retired, or moved across country. Many have published their work. Several have passed on to the other side. What happens to our art and writing when we die?
I went back through the notebook with a yellow highlighter and revisited the words I had written at a different time in my life. There were writing practices about a trip to Georgia, a pilgrimage with my mother to research ancestry. We searched cemetery plots in the rain and finally found the overgrown grave of her step-sister who died shortly after birth (I’d like to turn these into a finished piece). There were practices of dribble where I never dropped down into my body. They offered up a study of the crazy minute-to-minute thoughts that go on in one’s mind.
There were writing practices about the ghosts in Mabel’s room, the four-poster bed Dennis Hopper wanted to cut up with a chainsaw, the dogs and coyotes I heard roaming the Taos wilderness at night. In the paper margins were notes on bell ringing, mudras, zafus, and zabutons, and a schedule of the day trip to the plaza and the O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe. There was scratchy handwriting, sometimes barely legible, of erratic emotions and thoughts that spill on to the page when we stop talking.
I had forgotten so much; and remembered everything.
I’m excited for the possibilities of 2020: photography and practice, completing finished pieces, attending the haiku retreat in Santa Fe. It will be hard to drop into the discipline I once felt at the core. I could fail, but I have faith. When you look back a decade at your younger self, the creeping roots that once clawed their way into rich, black earth searching for nourishment spring forward like orchid tendrils in the sun — fortified aerial roots.
Handwritten notes in my October/December 2006 practice notebook from dharma talks and one-on-ones with Natalie Goldberg. I am grateful for everything she has taught me. And for the community of artists, writers, and contributors who helped create redRavine. It is a place I can return to feel grounded.
Follow the person behind you
Everyone feels insecure. It’s just what happens when we sit.
Rest. Make space.
Don’t push. Let yourself be.
Writing is manual labor of the mind.
The best kind of structure should be organic.
What can you be patient about? Make a list to remind yourself.
Crash through what holds you back.
Be willing to wait a long time for understanding.
Show first. Then tell. Don’t give everything all at once.
Don’t manipulate. Respect the reader. Slowly lead them where you want them to go.
Read Siddhartha again. His total breakdown led to enlightenment.
Push yourself to what you don’t know and make statements anyway. It pushes you into knowing.
Sometimes you tell the writing. Other times, the writing tells you.
You can’t just be a writer for a month. You have to be willing to go through the whole process, all of it.
If you get stuck, go back to basics: I remember, I’m thinking about, What I see in front of me.
Read Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.
Ride on the backs of the writers who came before you.
You can’t read a poem enough times.
Writing is about receiving. Sit still so you can receive.
Mary Dickens Biggs, grandmother of Marylin Biggs Schultz. Family photo, all rights reserved.
carved into granite
“many hopes are buried here”
broken hearts and lives
About this haiku: “As I begin to compose a haiku, I must appear to be drumming my fingers to a silent tune in my head, but those familiar with this poetic form, will know that I’m counting the syllables required in each line; 5-7-5. I hoped to use the inscription from my grandmother’s gravestone, and as fate would have it, there are seven. Here is my haiku for a dear one I never met but hold in love: Mary Dickens Biggs. (My father is the little boy barely visible in the back.)” -Marylin Biggs Schultz
–posted posthumously for Liz’s mother, Marylin Biggs Schultz (May 21st, 1937 – September 5th, 2019)
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About Marylin:Marylin (aka oliverowl) was a freelance writer living in Wyoming. She wrote essays for a weekly column in the Ventura Star Tribune, collaborated with her grandson on two picture books for children, and wrote with the Cody Writers. Her previous pieces for redRavine include the travel essay Rollin’ Easy, a Writing Practice, Kindness, and two memoir pieces, Images From The Past andTwo Little Girls & A World At War.
In 2010, Marylin was published in the book, From the Heart — Writing in the Shadow of the Mountain, a collection of work from members of Write On Wyoming (WOW), a group of authors and aspiring writers living in northeastern Wyoming. Her contributions to From the Heart include two works of fiction, To Love Bertie Lou and The Appointment Book, and a collection of haiku, Seasons in Wyoming.
Reading old journals opens up the past revealing details of thoughts and memories long forgotten. When digging through writing notebooks, I ran across this 20-minute Writing Practice from June 16, 2013. It relates to redRavine and lessons that travel with me. In 2019 I still write about the places I have lived, loved, and have yet to travel.
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Loving A Place – 20min
Second cup of French Roast. Kiev sleeps in the window on a fuzzy white cat bed piled on top of blankets. I go over to the desk, organize the pile of envelopes, advertisements, and receipts into separate categories. Then over to the table in front of the couch, an object I love, a painted table that Liz picked up at an auction many years ago. There are painted squares of eggplant, mustard, and turquoise, edged with swipes of paintbrush black. I like surrounding myself with art objects I love. She did good on this purchase.
Next, I gather piles of books from around the living room, most recent purchases, some from a few months ago. I notice that I am halfway through a couple of books, have not even started two more. There is Mni Sota Makoce, The Great Journey, She Had Some Horses, Dragonfly Dance, Twelve Owls. There is The Round House, Hawk Ridge, First Words, and Dewy, The Library Cat. A copy of Refuge that I’ve had for over a decade sits next to the Canon wireless printer. I dug it off a book shelf when Liz, Teri, and I went to see Terry Tempest Williams earlier this year.
I organize the books by size. The heavy photography books like Lightroom 3, Digital Photography, Sony Nex, Black & White Photography are placed on the solid piano bench next to the Room & Board recliner. Liz and I both still buy good reference books; though I am sure many now look online for similar information, there is nothing like a good hardcover book with illustrations. I open the window next to me, feel the light summer wind blow past my face. The cottonwood is just about done dropping her seeds. The cranberry that Liz has named Snowball is fully mature and is blooming with umbrella-shaped pods of white on the tips of her branches.
I feel like I need grounding. I remember something my writing teacher wrote to me after I told her that I was sad she no longer toured or taught in Minnesota. She said she thought I would find Minnesota in her writing. I pick up The True Secret of Writing and thumb through the book, taking notice of the chapter headings that are laced across the top of each page. Loving A Place jumped out at me. I started to read about a layover in Minnesota on the way to Bismarck, North Dakota. This looks good, I think. North Dakota for Liz; Minnesota for me. I settle in to read.
She is staying with a friend who lives near Lake Calhoun. It’s the dead of winter in Minnesota, below zero, at temperatures where ice refuses to be melted by salt.
Two women jog past me, then later a man with a dog on a leash; otherwise, I have the place to myself. I pick up my pace feeling the tips of my fingers freezing. I can’t believe how much love I feel for this place with no logic to it. Sure I met my great Zen teacher here and lived a few blocks away from him for six years and, yes, I learned a lot about writing here, teaching in poet-in-the-schools and then resident writer for two years in a multiracial, multiethnic elementary school and then finally winning a big in-state fellowship that brought me to Israel and that recognized me as a writer. But stopping by a hackberry and staring across the flat white surface of the lake as cars at my back sped by, I understand love has no reason, makes no sense.
Finally I didn’t belong here, just as some of my best loves were not practical to live with or marry, but spoke to a part of me that yearned to be met. And as the years go by I remember them with all the unsheltered love I couldn’t manage to tame. Even though no one would call Minneapolis a wild place, besides its winters, for me, a second-generation Jewish girl from Brooklyn, it was my American frontier. I met people who grew up on Iowa farms, close to that sprawling wide American river, the Mississippi. I watched as people dug holes in the ice and fished and went to summer cabins in the north of their state. I come back to Minneapolis as a seminal home where I have no family and no roots, like a stranger in a strange place.
I’ve written about Minnesota a lot, struggling to escape what I thought was a weird attachment. Most Minnesotans think I hate their state. They are wrong. When I write about a place at all, even if I make fun of it, it’s because it’s stuck to my heart.
My friend Miriam says I have a jones for place. Some people love cars, old houses, the cut and line of clothes. What does our obsession tell us about ourselves?
-from The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language, Part Three: Elaborations, Loving A Place, p. 110 by Natalie Goldberg
She was right. There was Minnesota. At the end of the chapter, she completed her journey into North Dakota, teaching students, then taking a trip to Theo Roosevelt National Park where the horses run wild. I see that wild in Liz, for generations back, connected to harsh winters, unforgiving wind, broad-stroked skies. Loving a place means learning to love the people who live in that place. Because the place has shaped the people they have become. Some of us are products of many places, depending on where our lives have taken us. To live in a place is not always to love a place; we come to love places where we have not lived.
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NOTE: The name of the Minneapolis lake mentioned in this Writing Practice (Lake Calhoun) was changed in 2017 to Mde Maka Ska. The Dakota originally called the lake Mde Maka Ska (modern spelling Bdé Makhá Ská meaning Lake White Earth. Related to the topic: WRITING TOPIC – A PLACE TO STAND
We are back in the Twin Cities. The morning we left Island Lake, the moon set in a dense fog. Three loons surfaced to greet the day. Magical is an overused word, but that’s how it felt sitting on the end of the misty dock watching sunlight hit the circling reeds.
We weren’t ready to step into work life Friday morning. The five-thirty alarm interrupted my dreams; the October sky seemed too dark for a waking body. When left to our own devices, we stay up late for creative work, rise later in the morning. We don’t naturally awaken at 5:30 or 6 a.m. in the city.
The ways we make a living around office computers and machinery hum (so different from the Taos hum) remind us of the unnatural habit-forming rhythms our bodies endure to live in a metropolitan landscape: traffic, crazy harried drivers, school bus dodging, and overcrowded parkways.
Cities are beautiful in a different way. Later we’ll take a two-mile walk around an urban lake and go to a friend’s home for an evening fire. The choices we make. I choose to keep writing.
We are out of the sauna followed by a dip in Island Lake. It’s the evening before we leave to travel home. We sit in black easy chairs in front of wall-length windows writing and working on photograph archives. Over the week we saw six pair of trumpeter swans, three common mergansers, one pair of eagles, and at least ten loons. A mature eagle just swooped down and flew in front of the window, then glided on through the birch.
“She’s here,” Liz said, looking my way. Our eyes lock. I feel my heart swell and break open in tears. We came to make space for grief, for the passing of Liz’s mom in September. Sadness is the other side of the joy I feel being here: walking in the autumn air, sitting on the dock listening to the cries of the loons, eavesdropping on a family of Canadian geese with Nikon binoculars. The goslings stay with the parents (who mate for life) for at least a year. Blood pressure is down, pores are clear, my heart beats low, even and steady.
We stopped to meditate on the one and a half mile walk around Loon Lake in Savannah Portage State Park. If I hadn’t portaged on canoe trips in the Boundary Waters and sank up to my knees in mud, I might not know what it’s like to carry a Duluth pack on my back, a canoe over my shoulders.
The Savannah Portage is part of history, a long, wet walk from Lake Superior near Duluth to an eastern bend in the Mississippi River just west of Big Sandy. Liz and I like to travel to places we haven’t been before. We are only a few hours from the Twin Cities; we had the lake all to ourselves. The reds and oranges of the maples are past peak, but the yellows of the birch and poplar are popping. Yellow. Soothing, bright, clear.
I am grateful for downtime. My gratitude list grew tenfold over the week. I know it’s a luxury to be able to take time off to grieve. After a loved one dies, the work-a-day world continues to churn. Mother Nature has given us solace. A place to sit on a glacial lake facing West, the direction of later life, the domain of sunsets, and oceans, and the sit bones of mountains.
QuoinMonkey & Skywire7 have followed Lily's journey since January 2010. We support the WRI & NABC.
Learn more about the wild bears of Shadow's Clan at the Wildlife Research Institute website & view Black Bears on the 24/7 Live Webcam at the North American Bear Center.
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