WP: 20-May-12 — Healing

By Elizabeth Statmore

Sunday morning, my second without Fromage. All I’ve wanted to do all week was look at profiles of rescue dogs. During standardized testing I searched Petfinder and Craigslist, reading about different available dogs and looking into their eyes. There are so many dogs who need homes, and the hole in my heart feels so huge.

But we need to get a hypoallergenic dog this time. It was a lucky miracle that David was not allergic to Fromage. So I started searching breed rescues, looking for Goldendoodles and Labradoodles who needed rescuing.

There aren’t that many breed rescue groups for doodles, in spite of the fact that they are one of the most popular breeds around these days. That means so many dogs who get given up for being too big, too active, etc. People give dogs up for the weirdest reasons. They get bored with the dog or they’re moving, so they say they have to give up the dog. They wouldn’t give up their children if they were moving, I think, but I can’t be sure.

So I started looking up Labradoodle breeders to inquire after adult dogs who might need re-homing or rescue. And I came upon Golden Gate Labradoodles just south of here, so I e-mailed Kristin the owner/breeder, to ask about rescues.

And she told me the most wonderful news I have heard all week.

They rarely get returns, since they breed first and foremost for temperament and they screen adopters carefully. But they do have a Guardian Program for their breeding dogs, and there’s one adult male they’ve recently added to their program whom they adore but who really deserves to have his own guardian family and home.

His name is Topper.

Topper was also the name of my very first pet — a dime store turtle from Kresge’s. I loved that turtle. I cared for him endlessly, fed him and petted him and made adventures for him in his little dime store turtle bowl with the red diving board and the green plastic palm tree on the central island oasis. I remember all of this vividly because he was the most interactive pet I had until we got our Schnauzer Cappy.

My eyes bugged out when I read that. I did a double-take.

Kristin forwarded me the information on their guardian program as well as some information about Topper as a family dog. It’s basically a foster-to-own program, in which the dog lives with you in your home as your pet, and a few times a year he has a breeding “gig,” for which you drive him either to the breeder or to the specialized repro vet. For male dogs, this is a pretty minor affair, dog sex being what it is — which is to say, quick and dirty (or in the case of the repro vet, very sanitary). When the dog’s breeding career comes to an end in a few years (probably four or five), ownership gets transferred, he gets neutered, and he lives with you as your forever dog.

They have come to love him dearly but their home pack consists of a number of already-estabished dogs in their program, and Kristin feels like it’s not fair to Topper, who deserves to be the center of attention in a family — the most-loved dog in his pack. So she’s been looking for the right family of owner-guardians to match him with.

She forwarded a link to his profile on their web site and my heart bloomed open. He could not be more different from Fromage — fluffy, non-shedding, mellow, confident, laid back. He’s the color of cafe au lait — referred to in Australian Labradoodle parlance as “cafe,” a diluted coffee color, almost taupe, with a non-shedding coat but the same eager, loving chocolate eyes I am looking for.

Kristin said the best way to ask more questions about Topper and/or the guardian program would be to call her. She gave me her cell phone number and said she hoped to talk to me soon.

I called her yesterday afternoon.

We talked for two hours.

In my original inquiry message, I explained that we had recently lost our beloved 15 ½ year old dog, Fromage. I included David’s collage of photos and told her my story of how I’d rescued him and how we had loved him.

She received this message on May 18th, 2012 — Topper’s second birthday.

On the phone we talked about everything — training and dog-loving philosophy, Topper’s and Fromage’s personalities, and our home set-up.

She and I bonded deeply. We love our dogs in very similar and compatible ways.

I told her it was clear to me that Fromage had held on as long as he could to take care of us, but that he just couldn’t do it any more. But I told her that I knew in my bones — and in my feet — that he wants us to adopt another dog who can take care of us. He needs a new dog to take over the work of rescuing us. It took him thirteen and a half years to raise us, and he doesn’t want all that good work to go to waste.

All of this clearly resonated with her. She wants to move toward the next step as much as I do.

I told David about it and he is open to it. Since I’m the primary caregiver, he is looking to me to lead. And since I am the crazy one, he is looking for me to set the pace.

I will probably go over and meet Topper after school one day this week. They don’t live far from my school. We talked about my timing, with graduation and summer coming, and having that be the best time for me to integrate a new dog into our household.

We would give a deposit that would be refunded gradually over time as certain milestones get met. Then once his breeding career is finished, in maybe five or so years, the last portion of that deposit would go towards his neutering fee and he’d be transferred over to us for forever.

This feels like a miracle.

Topper & Elizabeth, Home At Last, San Francisco, California, June 2012, photo © 2012 by David Bassin. All rights reserved.

_________________________

About Elizabeth: Elizabeth Statmore is a San Francisco-based writer and teacher of writing and mathematics. She is a long-time practitioner and teacher of Writing Practice, which she learned from Natalie Goldberg. A frequent contributor to KQED-FM, Elizabeth’s last posts for red Ravine include Seed Starting, a piece about writers as gardeners, and Writing The “Remembering Grace Paley” Piece — a step-by-step tutorial on how she turned a raw piece of writing into a finished radio commentary. Elizabeth was also one of our first guest writers, contributing the post Abandoned Is… Fromage was her dog and spirit guide of almost fourteen years.

Healing is Part III in a series of three Writing Practices about the love and loss of Fromage. Parts I and II are Long and The Gifts Of Trash Night.

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WP: 14-May-12 — The Gifts Of Trash Night

By Elizabeth Statmore

I wanted to find that Anne Lamott essay on their dog’s dying, but it’s in another book and I don’t have time to find it right now.

This is the first work day without Fromage, and I can already tell there are going to be a lot of awful firsts like this — first Trash Night without him, for example. Trash Night was Fromage’s favorite holiday. Lucky for him, it came every week. Tuesday nights, after dinner, we would bring the trash and recycling and composting down the front stairs and haul the wheeled cans to the curb — black for rubbish, blue for recycling, green for compostables.

David would wind him up as I started gathering the bags in the kitchen. “Trash Night!” he would exclaim to Fromage. “Trash Night!” And Fromage would start to dance around the room excitedly, wagging his tail hard and barking.

“Trash Night! Trash Night!”

Bark! Bark! Bark!

Being descended from a long line of working dogs and shepherds, he would herd me with our bags toward the front door, barking as if to yell, “Hurry up! It’s Trash Night, dammit!”

As far as he was concerned, the best nights were the ones when we needed to make the trip to the sidewalk more than once. He would dash up the stairs and bark down at me, urging me on. While I dealt with the carts and the bags, he would amble over to lift his leg and pee on a nearby sidewalk tree. it was his holiday — and now he is going to miss it forever more as we are going to miss him.

This hole in my heart feels bottomless, and it makes me wonder if I will ever feel whole again. I miss him with an ache and an urgency I can’t describe with words. This is my life now.

***
8:00 p.m. insight — Fromage does not want us to be lonely. He wants us to adopt another dog who can watch over us.

He loves us and doesn’t want us to be lonely.

He stayed as long as he could, but he just couldn’t do his job of taking care of us any more and he had to go. He’d dragged himself through sickness and dying, and it was time for him to leave us.

But he doesn’t want us to be lonely for too long.

He loves us and wishes us the best. It’s not a betrayal of him for us to love a new dog.

_________________________

About Elizabeth: Elizabeth Statmore is a San Francisco-based writer and teacher of writing and mathematics. She is a long-time practitioner and teacher of Writing Practice, which she learned from Natalie Goldberg. A frequent contributor to KQED-FM, Elizabeth’s last posts for red Ravine include Seed Starting, a piece about writers as gardeners, and Writing The “Remembering Grace Paley” Piece — a step-by-step tutorial on how she turned a raw piece of writing into a finished radio commentary. Elizabeth was also one of our first guest writers, contributing the post Abandoned Is… Fromage was her dog and spirit guide of almost fourteen years.

The Gifts Of Trash Night is Part II in a series of three Writing Practices about the love and loss of Fromage. Part I is titled Long.

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WP: 13-May-12 – Long

By Elizabeth Statmore

Fromage died on Saturday, May 12th 2012 at 11:30 p.m. at All Animals Emergency Hospital, surrounded by us and our love. He was dehydrated and disoriented, with a temperature of 105.6. Normal temperature for dogs is 101-ish, with 102 being in the high fever range. So Fromage had a raging fever, probably from a combination of a brain tumor (or nervous system tumor) and end-stage kidney disease.

We knew it was serious when he couldn’t do anything with a Beggin’ Strip — his favorite treat in the universe. And I’d dreamed Wednesday morning that he died. I knew it was a precognitive dream, but I didn’t know how or when the end would happen.

He did his utmost to stay alive for me — to support me and love me through this disorienting chapter of my life. He showed the same heroic courage and love he had shown us all his life. He was an impeccable warrior to the end, but in the end it was time to let him go.

It was the night before Mother’s Day.

It’s the little things that really punch me in the gut — the moments that interrupt my conditioned habits, such as automatically tucking the newspaper bags into the plastic bag collection next to the front door, only to realize that I don’t have a need to save dog poop bags any more.

I put his sterling silver tag on a chain and started wearing it around my neck last night as I went to bed.

He was the only being who has ever called me his mother. On our first Mother’s Day he bought me a pair of dog socks.

He was the dog of my life.

He was the dog of my heart.

I somehow left my favorite fountain pen at school on Friday, but I was too stressed-out and worried yesterday to deal with it. But this morning, all I wanted to do was write, so I drove down to school and back to retrieve it.

When we got to All Animals, Fromage had a fever of 105.6. This was a raging brain fever. He couldn’t even walk down our front stairs. I carried him in my arms down the thirteen front steps — all 60+ pounds of him. David carried him into the car. He was dehydrated and disoriented and scared. He was dying.

I held him in the back seat while David drove. He lay quietly on the back seat, watching where we were going.

He had kept himself alive so he could support me. And now I knew it was my turn to support him by letting him go and by easing his passage into the next world, into his next life.

Fred always said that Fromage was my spirit guide.

Now my heart just aches. David’s too. Fromage loved David so much, even though David felt hurt that Fromage was always so freaked out and demented these last few years. David hugged him and loved him too, even though there was so much dog hair. By last night, no one cared.

I can’t put away his old beds or mats yet. I am still processing the fact that he is gone. There is a giant Fromage-shaped hole in my heart — one with one stand-up ear and one flappy ear. The stand-up ear is his right one. It has a bite taken out of the tip. My lips and fingers know the shape of that missing spot instinctively. Completely. Like a fingerprint.

He’d been staying alive to get me through this tough time. On Wednesday night I got the word that my layoff notice had been rescinded. He went downhill fast from there.

I loved that dog so much.

He loved me more purely and wholeheartedly than I had ever been loved before. It was a healing kind of love. He healed me. He made me whole.

When Crystal and I saw Mary Oliver the first time at the Herbst a few years ago, Mary had recently lost her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook, and had been writing about it for some time. A woman in the audience asked how she’d gotten through the devastating loss. “Well,” she said, first you go a little crazy. You go nuts for a while.” That thought comforts me now. I am going to have to go a little nuts for a while while I grieve.

The loss feels cavernous.

It’s also tinged with fear and shame that I might not be experiencing appropriate gratitude for the gift of his life. I *do* feel a bottomless gratitude for his life. It’s just that right now, this is the part where I have to take in and let out the hurting — the loss and the groundlessness of impermanence.

In legal terms, I rescued him, but the emotional truth is that he is the one who rescued me.

He was a magical dog, a magical creature. In mythical terms, he was my magical helper-being.

“A dog lives fifteen years, if you’re lucky,” Mary Oliver writes in one of her dog poems. In so many, many ways I’ve been very, very lucky. Fromage was in good health and good spirits until this very last week. He enjoyed long walks and Trash Night and giving David five and ten and eating Beggin’ Strips until the very last day of his life. He watched for my return through the glass in the front door every single day of our life together.

As we left the hospital room after it was over, I kissed him behind his flappy ear — where, even in death, he still smelled like a puppy — and I whispered to him, “Okay, Puppity, guard the house.”

Then we left the treatment room and closed the door behind us.

I did not look back.

Fromage at the Dog Garden, Dog Garden, San Francisco, California, April 2004, photo © 2004 by Carlos Hillson. All rights reserved.

_________________________

About Elizabeth: Elizabeth Statmore is a San Francisco-based writer and teacher of writing and mathematics. She is a long-time practitioner and teacher of Writing Practice, which she learned from Natalie Goldberg. A frequent contributor to KQED-FM, Elizabeth’s last posts for red Ravine include Seed Starting, a piece about writers as gardeners, and Writing The “Remembering Grace Paley” Piece — a step-by-step tutorial on how she turned a raw piece of writing into a finished radio commentary. Elizabeth was also one of our first guest writers, contributing the post Abandoned Is… Fromage was her dog and spirit guide of almost fourteen years.

Long is Part I in a series of three Writing Practices about the love and loss of Fromage.

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Seed Starting

By Elizabeth Statmore



Writers are gardeners. We sow seeds and cultivate worlds. Every writing practice I do is a seed I hope will germinate, but I have to approach it with no expectations. Seeds, like words, are happily indifferent to my intentions. They force me to learn over and over how to follow their process without hope or expectations.

I keep a seed-starting station on the bookcase in my bay window sill. I face it while I do writing practice on the couch. It has fifteen deep cells, each planted with a different hope for my garden. Actually I sow in multiples. Right now I have two each of flat-leaf parsley, winterbor kale, lacinato or dinosaur kale, speckled trout lettuce, and Merveille des Quatre Saisons lettuce, among others. I have three cells of an heirloom ruffled pansy I am nuts about — chalon suprème purple picotée. The flowers are ruffled confections of deep plum and violet and mauve and golden yellow and white. They’re not easy to find. I have to order the seeds online from a web store in England.

As with writing practice, there are no guarantees. You make positive effort, but you can’t know in advance what will root and take off and what will refuse to cooperate in your plans.


My parsley cells have gone crazy. Same for the two types of kale. This year the pansies have agreed to participate. Some years they just refuse to release their secrets.

One of the White Boston Lettuce cells has sprung magically to life while the other has stayed mum. The seeds just refuse to get started. They sit there beneath the surface of their sterilized germinating mix, lips pressed stubbornly shut. They squint up at me when I inspect them. They dare me to plant over them.

The seed-starting system is a miniature greenhouse, with an opaque bottom tray and a clear plastic domed top. The top has two green louvered vents that can be opened once the first seed leaves poke their noses up out of the ground.

I placed the tray on a large baking sheet to catch any drips that overflow out of the sides. Germination is a moist and messy business. I have already had to refinish the top of the wooden bookcase once.

Below the baking sheet is an electric warming mat. It’s like a special heating pad for sprouting seeds. They respond to the warming temperature of the soil they are planted in, like words in a writing practice. They only start their work once I’ve warmed things up.

The other key to the seed-starting station is an old little desk lamp I’ve outfitted with a fifteen-watt greenhouse bulb. It’s a compact fluorescent that emphasizes the blue rays of the light spectrum, the ones that seedlings respond to.

I’ve learned all this from library books. I was not raised as a farm kid or even a gardener’s kid.


I am struck by the familiar combination of artifice and natural conditions I have to create to get things started. Some of my non-writing-practice writer friends feel this way about my reliance on writing practice. They ask how I can ever get projects done when I give over so much of my writing energy and time to wandering aimlessly across the pages of my Spiderman notebooks.

I’ve tried to explain it to them, but it’s like starting a garden from seeds. If you don’t do it this way yourself, it’s tough to wrap your mind around. How can a bunch of specks in a paper envelope turn into fragrant pasta sauces or salads? One person’s mystery looks like another person’s madness.

Elizabeth Statmore is a San Francisco-based writer and gardener. She is a long-time practitioner of Writing Practice, which she learned from Natalie Goldberg, and she recently finished her first novel by using Writing Practice as her foundation.

A frequent contributor to KQED-FM, Elizabeth’s last piece for red Ravine—Writing The “Remembering Grace Paley” Piece—was a step-by-step tutorial on how she turned a raw piece of writing into a finished radio commentary. Elizabeth was also one of our first guest writers, contributing the post Abandoned Is…. All doodles © 2009 by ybonesy.

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Writing The “Remembering Grace Paley” Piece

By Elizabeth Statmore

Here’s how a recent radio commentary emerged from writing practice to final recording.

This piece started life being written by hand as a 10-minute writing practice. Typed up, it came out to 595 words. Here’s the original, unedited writing practice:

I need to babble a bit and probably ramble on about things unrelated to my chapter. God, I really want this chapter to be over. Get it over with already. I am going to have to turn it over to my Higher Power.

But right now what occurs to me is how I felt when I heard the news that Grace Paley had died. I played ping-pong with her one summer at a women’s writing workshop at a Benedictine retreat center in the forests of central Oregon. She was the writer-in-residence that week — no students for her, no obligations except to be present with that wide green ping-pong table in the great hall that looked out over the bend in the wild McKenzie River.

She was always ready for a game or just a rally, and she seemed to be almost lurking by the table, waiting for her next victim or partner to come by and play with her.

She was not a particularly gifted ping-pong player, but she played with great gusto and delight and with an enthusiasm that was infectious.

She was already older, a round, frumpy looking woman with a careless halo of white curls and luminous blue eyes that glowed with a fierce sense of fun. She would hang out there by the reference books, the communal dictionary and other resources, waiting for someone to come along and play ping-pong. She was like the troll by the bridge or other mythical helper figures in fairy tales that the protagonist has to get by. It was as if a few rounds of ping-pong with her were just the thing to get you over that hump in your chapter or to work out the kinks in your sonnet.

I had read some of her stories and I grew up in the world that was the sequel to the one she depicted.

When she played she had a way of rocking from one foot to the other in victory. She also had a good-natured paddle slam through the air when she flubbed a shot.

She came to all the student readings, not just the faculty ones, and she took us seriously. I danced over the moon the night she told me she loved a piece I read aloud that evening. You might have heard me joining in the coyote madrigals in the forest after midnight later that night.

It was only in hindsight that I recognized how much greater was the gift she gave me through her stories. Growing up in that sequel world to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, it was eye-opening to read the shadow side, the lives of the Jewish women of that era dealing with love and loss and heartbreak and belief.

She didn’t just hang out with the other teachers — all noted authors in their own right — but she at whole-grain hippie pizza with us students on the deck and seduced us into senseless ping-pong marathons / tournaments that lasted late into the night and talked politics with us and what it meant to work as a writer.

She decided early on in her career that it was too overwhelming to try and write a novel, too big a project for her. She dedicated herself to her work as a miniaturist.

In the end what remains is her generosity, both in her work and in her living. She shared her mind with us and her enormous human heart, and we are all the richer for it. She will be missed.

I realized this could be the basis of a successful NPR commentary. Why? Three main reasons:

1. it had a good “news peg” (relationship to a current news event)
2. it offered a unique and personal connection to the subject (ping pong, rather than writing)
3. it included a lot of fresh and interesting details

But to make it work, I would have to pare this first draft way down.

Through experience, I’ve learned that the text of my commentaries can only be about 350 words long — including the sign-off — in order to fit into the strict two-minute time slot in the Morning Edition clock that KQED uses (see examples of the major NPR clocks that affiliate stations have to adhere to at this link).

In radio, the time limit is the law. You will be edited or discarded if you can’t stay within the time count. So I am religious about rehearsing and knowing my time count.

For a two-minute commentary slot, my ideal is to come in between 1:48 and 1:52. At my normal speaking speed, that gives me about 350 words. In essence, this piece needed to be almost cut by half. This is where it comes in handy to know how to separate the creator from the editor.

STEP 1 – Say each thing only once.

In most of my writing practices I tend to cycle around ideas, topics, and memories, taking as many swings at the ball as I want to. It’s writing practice. Who cares if I repeat myself or babble witlessly?

But for publication or broadcast, few things merit that much repetition. I took out my scalpel and cut out everything extra. I use Word’s “Track Changes” feature (pictured here) to make my first round of slash-and-burn cuts. Once you turn on this feature, Word will puts each deletion or change into a colored bubble on the side so you can make decisions about each one later.

It’s also true that you need to come right to the point in a short piece. “I played ping-pong with Grace Paley one summer…” is the hook in this write. I used that as my lead.

STEP 2 – Reassess.

This is always the horrifying step for me. I do a word count on what’s left after I think I’ve sliced out all my little darlings. The draft is now down to 515 words. On the one hand, this is good news: I’ve cut out 80 words with no pain. On the other hand, I still have to cut out another 165 words.

STEP 3 – Boil it down.

This is where the editing process gets interesting for me. The process shifts from surgical to chemical. I need to find ways to distill down the sense of what I’m saying in fewer words. Phrases need to be boiled down. For example: “but she played with gusto and an enthusiasm that was infectious” gets shorted to “but she played with gusto and with an infectious enthusiasm.”

Every single word must be considered.

Toward the end, I find two sentences that each encapsulate my elation at her positive feedback. I have to get rid of one, no matter how much I love it. Much denial and gnashing of teeth. I take the dog for a walk. In the end, I decided to drop my address to the listener, “You may have heard me later that night, when I joined in the coyote madrigals across the forest.”

It’s cute, but cutting it retains the sense and gives back 18 words. I’ll use the idea somewhere else another time.

Cutting out “depicting them with unflinching honesty” gives back another 5 words.

I add in the tag line (“With a Perspective, I’m Elizabeth Statmore”) which adds a non-negotiable 6 words, unless I change my name to a one-word moniker like Prince or Madonna (unlikely).

Eventually I trim the whole thing down to a workable 358 words and submit it to my editor for consideration. Every commentary is a completely new submission.

STEP 4 – Rewrite.

After 4,000 years (or three days, I can’t remember) the editor writes back and tells me he likes it a lot but worries that many listeners won’t know who she is and the intro can’t provide much context. He asks if I can take a stab at finding a way to establish who she is early on.

This means finding more words to cut but even worse, finding a way to sum up who Grace Paley was in a few words.

I did some writing practice and came up with an allegorical analogy (that Ph.D. in Comparative Literature comes in handy again!) comparing her to a present-day equivalent that most Bay Area readers would recognize, at least by name.

Here’s what I came up with:

That may not mean much to some of you, but for many of us she was a literary rock star, an award-winning author and activist who could be funny and political and profoundly compassionate all at once. Basically, the Anne Lamott of her time.

I cut a few more extra words and boiled it down to 366 words, which is fine if I rehearse properly.

By now there wasn’t much time left to get it recorded while it was still current! I chase down the supervising recording engineer and book the first studio appointment available the next day.

Here is the final version, which was broadcast on KQED on Tuesday, 4-Sep-07:

I played ping-pong with Grace Paley one summer at a women’s writing workshop in the forests of central Oregon.

That may not mean much to some of you, but for many of us she was a literary rock star, an award-winning author and activist who could be funny and political and profoundly compassionate all at once. Basically, the Anne Lamott of her time.

She was the writer-in-residence that week — no students, no obligations except to be present with that wide green table in the great hall that looked out over a bend in the wild McKenzie River.

Grace was not a particularly gifted ping-pong player, but she played with gusto and with an infectious enthusiasm.

She was already older, a tiny round woman with a careless halo of white curls and luminous blue eyes. She would hang out by the reference books, lying in wait for some new ping-pong partner, like some mythical helper figure in a fairy tale that the protagonist has to get past. As if a few rounds of ping-pong with her were just the thing to get you over that hump in your chapter.

When she won, she rocked gleefully from one foot to the other. When she flubbed a shot, she slashed her paddle through the air in frustration and spun around.

She didn’t just hang out with the other luminaries. She ate whole-grain hippie pizza with us students on the deck and lured us into endless ping-pong marathons. We talked politics and she asked us what it meant to work as writers.

She came to all the student readings and took us seriously. I danced over the moon the night she told me she loved a piece I read aloud that evening.

I understand now some of the gifts she left behind. She dedicated herself to the life of the miniaturist, caressing the shadow side of that world claimed by Philip Roth, the unnoticed lives of the women as they dealt with love and loss.

In the end what remains is her generosity. She shared her mind and her enormous human heart, and we are the richer for it. She will be missed.

With a Perspective, I’m Elizabeth Statmore.

I think this version retains all the spirit of the original, but in a form that enables it to find publication. Ultimately that’s all editing really is — helping your piece to find a foot hold.

You can hear Elizabeth’s piece Remembering Grace Paley on KQED Radio at this link. It aired yesterday, Tuesday, September 4, 2007.  Elizabeth is a frequent contributor to KQED-FM’s Perspective series. To read more about Elizabeth, visit her website, Elizabeth Statmore.

 

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Abandoned Is…

by Elizabeth Statmore

Writing this book is the loneliest journey I have ever been on.
Nothing even compares — not divorce, not mental illness, not
abandonment, not the murder of my best friend from high school. Not
therapy. Not meditation.

The other day I told Natalie how hard I am finding this last stretch.
She agreed sympathetically and compared it to giving birth. “At the
end, you really have to push.”

A thought occurred to me. “So is there an epidural when you get to
this part?”

She laughed. “No painkillers. Just screaming.”

Some days I wonder if this is how the deeply delusional feel in
psychiatric hospitals. I shuffle around the house in my socks and a
dark blue sweatshirt, muttering to myself. Just me and my characters.
I hear their voices. They argue and negotiate on the pages of my
spiral notebook. I plug cartridge after cartridge into my Waterman
fountain pen. Black ink only. I can’t bear to see colors these days.

The other night my dharma teacher said, “Intention precedes action.”
I wrote this on a small yellow Post-It and placed it next to the
altar on the far left corner of my desk. On the wall just above it is
a companion Post-It with a recovery saying on it. The saying was
given to me by a fellow writing practice writer. It says, “Motivation
follows action.”

This captures how I am feeling these days. Intention precedes action
and motivation follows it. And I am suspended in the action in the
middle, groundless and beyond grasping, hovering over the edge of the
cliff like the great dharma teacher Wile E. Coyote. I blink into the
camera and feel myself gulp before the fall.

Abandoned Is… is a writing practice written from the Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – “ABANDONED.”

About writing, Elizabeth says:  I love the way writing practice lets me crawl through the window of a dream into the spirit world, where wild time is woven together with ordinary time to bind our souls to joy. I began writing practice in 1988, when I discovered Writing Down The Bones at my favorite bookstore, and I began formal study with Natalie Goldberg soon thereafter. Day by day, this practice has taught me to accept my whole mind and to work my way through life one word at a time.

Revisiting my old spiral notebooks reminds me how hard I worked in the learning but more importantly, how hard I had to try. They remind me how I learned to step forward with my own voice and declare, “The only one who limits me is me.” Year in, year out, they remind me how this practice has given me who I am.

 

In addition to the novel she is writing, Elizabeth is a frequent contributor to KQED-FM’s Perspectives series. If you would like to read more about Elizabeth, visit her website, Elizabeth Statmore. To listen to her work on Perspectives, click on the link, radio.

 

 

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, August 13th, 2007

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