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Can't Think of Everything
Another factor that figured in my notoriety was that most men in Costa Rica don’t drive, and it was even stranger to see a woman in the driver’s seat. The women who had become regulars at the job site seemed to consider me odd. It was as if they were questioning, “Who is this strange Señora who acts like a man?” On any given day, my cargo might include 2’x4’s, a wheelbarrow, concrete blocks, or ungainly ribs of rebar nodding beyond the tailgate at the insistence of the truck’s movement. One day, Jim sent me after ballast from a nearby riverbed. Two of the laborers he had hired from the village rode along to dig the muddy rocks from the rushing waters of a nearby river. It took them about an hour to fill the bed with enough rocks and sandy dirt to use in the new recipe of cement they would be mixing that day.
As I waited for them to finish, I read Harriett Simpson Arnow’s book Mountain Path, a novel portraying Appalachian life. Something she wrote about her protagonist in the novel resonated with me, and it had to do with the people of Costa Rica. “…[it] was as if they betokened some reservoir of primitive strength and calmness that she could not understand or define because it was lacking in her own life. She had expected that they would be embarrassed in her presence, not she in theirs…” Wow! I thought, the recognition that I’d been harboring an underlying arrogance shooting through me like a Taser barb. The fact that I’d not even realized I’d set foot in Costa Rica with this baggage was a complete shock.
I was ripped back to the present when one of the laborers knocked on the back window then lowered himself beside the other guy already sprawled atop the heap of rocks and dirt. I started the engine, put the truck in gear and trundled along the muddy path back to the highway, bumping along rocks and skirting bushy hummocks of tall grasses. Nothing seemed unusual while I was making my way back to the highway, but once I bounced onto the asphalt and pressed the accelerator, I panicked because the steering was barely guiding the truck.
As I slowed the swaying vehicle, it responded and my racing heart settled down. I tested my speed, trying to figure out at what point I lost control. Finding equilibrium, I limped along the edge of the highway with buses and commercial trucks flashing past until I pulled off the thoroughfare onto the dirt road leading to Zent. I hadn’t realized how upset I’d been until Jim came striding up to the truck. I was so emotional I could hardly speak. He noticed something was up and asked me what was wrong.
“Something’s going on with the steering,” I said, my voice shaky. “I would lose control any time I went over 30 miles an hour.”
“That’s because the backend was loaded down,” he said, the laughter he was barely keeping at bay crinkling the corners of his eyes. “With the load in the back, the front wheels weren’t meeting the road when you picked up speed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that would happen?” I asked, tears threatening to spill.
“I can’t think of everything,” he retorted as he turned to walk back to the concrete-block shell that had gained a bit of height while I’d been gone.
In protest of his insensitivity, I boycotted the jobsite for several days, which was a joke, of course, because my contributions were so minimal. Gus and Gertrude were happy to have me around, though I wasn’t exactly a cheerful companion. Anytime Jim and I were in the same room, the two of them were overtly nervous—Gertrude fidgeting and Gus rubbing the stubby knob of his chin in consternation as he warily eyed Jim. The moment my turncoat husband entered the room, I simply picked up whatever book I was reading and pretended to be absorbed—childish, I know, but I wasn’t ready to capitulate and neither was he. I’d watch out of the corner of my eye as he limped in from the jobsite—his clothes covered in mud and sweat, and his back slightly bent from the hard work he’d done that day. He’d head straight for the shower, and the words on the pages of my book du jour might as well have been hieroglyphics for the sense they made as they dissolved and reappeared in my vision, my petulance clouding everything. They were merely props in my angry standoff anyway as I was in too tough a mood to concentrate.
Though the chaos of our shorter trips made for a chaotic life, I was glad that this particular one was nearly over because the place we were in was dark indeed and I saw no way out of the hole we’d dug ourselves into.
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Finité!
I had stayed at the center that day to read and write, retreating to our bedroom as quickly as was polite to do so. Sitting cross-legged on the bed with my notebook on my lap, I charged myself with the task of recording an episode that had taken place the evening before while Jim and I stood outside the center talking with Bishop Wilson. The event shined a spotlight on two dogs living in a scrubby yard across the street from the center, which was nothing more than a weed-pocked parcel of ground sliced in half by a slack clothesline that perpetually sagged under the weight of ragged sheets and towels. The dogs spent most days lounging in the heat and humidity, roaming around only when the sun trudged west enough to move the one ever dwindling, already scant patch of shade they could find. As we talked with the Bishop, a third dog trotted up to the edge of their yard, sniffing at an empty candy wrapper tossed onto the dirt. Being territorial animals, the pair charged it without a second’s hesitation.
The fight was vicious, and after what seemed like ages of snarling, lunging and biting, the third dog went on its way, shaking its head as it loped off, a spurt of blood flying from one of its floppy ears. One of the neighbor dogs seemed unscathed; the other limped back to the scrim of shade, whining as it went. It eased its rear-end onto the dirt near the foundation of the small house and licked the gashed leg it had favored in a rhythmic motion that went on as long as we stood there and probably into the night.
Like these canines, the people in Costa Rica, who were some of the humblest I’d ever met, lived with the persistent threat of cruelty. Disaster could (and did) strike so blatantly without warning but, unlike the scrappy dog nursing his wound, they withstood whatever challenged them with great equanimity. It struck me that evening that their serenity was the perfect paradox to the brutal natural world surrounding them.
After we’d said goodbye to the Bishop, my stomach still in knots from the dog fight, Jim and I walked to Mares, one of the better restaurants in town. It was a place we frequented and I was actually growing accustomed to the taste of spaghetti made with cilantro, much to my surprise. As I was twirling the noodles around my fork, Jim motioned to Armando, the waiter, to alert him that there was a roach on the table a few feet away from ours. Armando casually approached, flipped it into the floor with his towel and stepped on it. With a flourish, he turned to us and said, “Finité!”
Though the bug was one of the biggest I’d seen, I’d spied a larger one a few days earlier in the store where I normally bought orange muffins for breakfast. It was so huge that it reminded me of one of those trucks the owners would jack sky high—fitting it with monstrous hydraulic shocks and tires the size of giant boulders that would churn far below the wheel wells. Though this rally roach had appalled me as it flitted between the muffins in the case, I felt I had to give it credit for its uniqueness because it was the first jacked-up insect I’d ever seen. I left without the muffins that day. If the Zeus of roaches had brazenly braved the case in daylight, what else had been waltzing between the baked goods the night before? I wondered. That was one answer I was happy to leave unimagined.
With my musings about the canine battle for supremacy and our run-in with the roach safely on the page, I leaned my head against the concrete block wall above the bed and celebrated that we were about to head home. I felt excited that I’d once again be surrounded by neatness and order rather than dirt and a long procession of gigantic insects that gave the word menace a whole new meaning.
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Drip, Drip, Drip...
Violent storms were a common occurrence—such a different feel to the weather than we’d experienced during our first trip as we built the church in Germania. The thunder would rumble and lighting would incessantly rend the inkiness of the sky as it zigzagged from cloud to ground to cloud at night. I wasn’t as nervous about Mother Nature’s angry displays as I would have been were we staying in one of the slapped-together clapboard buildings we’d been able to find for lodgings before. The center was solidly built of brick and it had windows that closed to help fend off the reverberating noise growing louder as the storms intensified deep into the night.
The security had helped me to relax, and early during our stay Jim and I were less at odds for a change. I’d been praying we would find some middle ground on which to stand and it worked until I tried to discuss how long we would continue the work that was testing me to my very core. I broached the question yet again one night as we walked from a dinner at St. Mark’s. “I understand this is hard for you, but I believe we are doing the right thing,” he answered, his taut lips giving away his frustration. “I’m not sure how long we’ll continue so I wish you could just relax and pitch in when I need you.”
I hung on, holding back my emotions, because I felt I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if I’d lost him. All the while I wondered how I would keep my sanity if the work stretched on for years. One day I’d begged off from my duties as the delivery service to stay at the center and read. As I journaled about my conundrum, I cursed the commode in the bathroom next to our room, which ran incessantly. Its gurgling accompanied the continual staccato made by the shower head—drip, drip, drip. Was this trickling sonata similar to the water torture the Chinese are said to have perfected? I wondered. Tap, tap, tap, the water teased…
As my mind half-heartedly kept pace with the dribble, I wrote, “Each trip we take here shunts me from the life I live in the states to a life I don’t live in Costa Rica, and each transition is squeezing the vitality from me, drop by precious drop. Maybe the bathroom’s melody is the perfect soundtrack for the movie they’ll make about my tragic story someday!” It was a joke, of course—who’d want to make a film about such a spoiled human being incapable of giving herself over to God’s work? Seeking a way out of my downward spiral, I pulled the book about poetic forms from the stack on the bedside table with the idea of turning my past scribbles into structured ideas that I could hone when I had a more stable world in which to write. I made absolutely no headway because each entry I reviewed sounded trite, overly meager or far too depressing. I imagined someone reading these sad missives recoiling because the exercise was akin to being forced to drink an excess of espresso coffee—cup after bitter cup in quick succession.
By the time the sun was ducking below the horizon, I grew weary of the negativity of it all, retreating to fiction to escape my melodramatic grudge with the life I was living. The novel I’d chosen—Sally Bauman’s Destiny—had the perfect level of intrigue from the start. I had been lugging the impressively sized hardback with me as I zipped between Limon and Zent, tossing it onto the seat of the truck so many times I’d nearly broken the spine. I was happy to finally be delving into the plotline, glad to be in Edouard’s head rather than in my own.
When my eyes grew weary in the darkening room, I put the book aside and wondered what my friends at home were doing, words that suddenly felt so foreign and concepts that felt so far away. My truce with Jim had dissipated in a mere week’s time. My writer’s notebook served as a witness to how awful it had become: “I laid in bed a long time this morning; frustration was my sheet. You expect better of me, do you? That’s just it: everyone always expects better of me.”
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On the Outside Looking In
Gertrude, or Gertrudis as he called her, was a trim woman with the heart of a young girl (she's shown in the photo above with her granddaughter Kimberly). She had a high-pitched, singsong voice that would rise even higher with any revelation—and most conversations, regardless how mundane they turned out to be, were revelations to Gertrude. She would look at the person she was speaking with and say, “That’s right?”—the last syllable ending in a squeak. The same statement without the question mark was her stock answer to any question that came her way: “That’s right!” she would insist, the tail of the response falling toward an adamant flatness.
Gus had an aquarium that he liked to talk about but didn’t like to clean. On our way from the market one morning, we passed a local shop that sold aquarium supplies. He admired a new model that was double the size of his, which they had just received and were displaying in the window. I asked him if it was expensive. He opened his eyes wide and said, “Oh, yes!” with a Carib-like lilt that made his voice rise and fall in rhythmically strong waves when he talked.
“Having an aquarium is a proud ting,” he remarked.
“Why?” I asked, feeling sorry for the lone creature inside his fish version of hell because the poor thing had to choke its way through an algae-infested green muck to swim around.
“When we are on the outside looking in—seeing the fish struggling to survive—it makes it easier to keep going out here,” he explained. “When you have one fish, it just swims around lonely like we do if we are alone; that’s why I want a second fish someday.” This declaration didn’t bode well for another unlucky vertebrate who might be plopped into the goop of Gus’ tank at some point.
Like many of the descendents of the immigrants from the West Indies who had settled in Costa Rica, Gus and Gertrude were diminutive. Gus kept his nappy hair cut short, while Gertrude’s was always molded into an orderly arrangement of rolls she created with bobby pins and then combed out. They had a fair amount of gold in their teeth, which glinted in the sunlight as they sat on the front porch of the center in metal folding chairs laughing at each other’s jokes.
While Gus was the stoic, philosophical one, Gertrude was filled with devil-may-care liveliness. When she was a girl, a wild pig had charged her and she loved to tell the story. As she prepared to recite the anecdote, she stood straight as a rod and then slowly leaned over so she could push her bottom out. She’d pause; then wiggle her butt before dissolving into a fit of giggles that would go on for several minutes. She sometimes had to start three or four times before she could straighten her expression and say, “Grrump, Grrump!” That’s all she could manage before she collapsed onto her chair, the laughter taking over. Once she composed herself, she would raise her head from the arms folded on her lap, shake it from side to side, and say, “Aye, yai, yai; I was so scairt of it!”
Kimberly, who called Gertude Gita, was always after her to reenact the event. She would say, “Tell the pig story, Gita; pleaaaassse!” Kimberly’s accent was somewhere between a Jamaican-like English and Spanish, and her hair was always artfully done with rows of ringlet curls tied with ribbons or fastened with rubber bands fitted with adornments. She insisted that these accessories always matched her school uniform or whatever outfit she was wearing. Were she living in a place that had what we have come to call fashion consciousness, she’d be considered a clotheshorse!
The F-150 that Jim had shipped to San Jose was finally ours and it made a big difference in the efficiency with which the project took shape. The old truck’s dented and scratched doors emblazoned with the faded logos of his construction company groaned when opened and sounded like firecrackers exploding under tin cans when slammed shut. With the freedom the vehicle brought us, I was on the road more than ever, gathering supplies that kept the jobsite buzzing.
This meant my time for reading was brief because it was nearly impossible to concentrate with so many interruptions. Writing anything coherent was even more impossible. I’d begin an entry in my notebook only to be summoned for another road trip. A full section of these pages would have convinced any medical professional that I had suddenly acquired A.D.D. What could I do other than snap it shut—my last thought left open-ended—and toss it into my canvas bag? After all, this was my contribution to the project for now. Each time I acquiesced, I would file away the hope that I’d manage a full entry before the blazing sun left the tropics for its circuitous journey to places I could only imagine.
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Playing Chicken
It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I took those limes from the hands of the woman in Germania and yet it felt as if we had only just left Costa Rica. For future projects, Jim had decided we would not be staying long. Instead, we’d take one-week and two-week trips, which would be maniacally sprinkled between beach time, ski time, party time and “real life.” As we loaded our bags into the car for our first trip since our work in Germania had ended, I thought about how my writing voice seemed to have caught laryngitis and I imagined it would only get quieter as we returned to the mission field.
In order to consolidate some traveling, we decided to drive to Atlanta so we could leave my car to be serviced, then fly to Costa Rica from there. I’d given up on the cabriolet and had traded it for an XJ6 sedan, which was mechanically sound. We dropped the Jag at the dealer and had them take us to the Ritz Carlton where we could catch the shuttle to the airport. I was embarrassed by our LL Bean duffle bags, which the dealer’s driver plunked beneath the hotel’s porte cochére. It put me in a testy mood and as we pulled away from the luxe hotel, I thought to myself, From the Ritz to the shits in just one day!No one picked us up in San Jose as the Bishop had before so we took a taxi from the airport to the bus depot. I was nervous about taking the bus, as I’d seen how the drivers seemed to secretly worship hari-kari as they raced through the mountain passes. I gripped the armrest of the seat most of the way, easing up only as we slowed for the first stop on the Caribbean side of the mountain range. I’d given up on reading while trying to watch the road. I must have read the same paragraph of Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games about twelve times before I decided watching the road was winning my attention. The bus driver parked in front of the Pulperia Los Angeles to load a few additional sojourners before we would continue west to Limon, passing Germania along the way. It was raining and the runoff that sluiced from the metal hulk of the bus swirled into opalescent paisley shapes as it mixed with the oil and gas on the garbage-strewn road. We wouldn’t visit Zent, a village that housed workers for the banana trade where we would build another concrete-block church, until the next day. As I peered through the rain-flecked window, I felt the sinking feeling that always brought me down when I was “in country” as I had come to call it—out of no disrespect to the military, of course, but it felt so right because being in Costa Rica always put me at war with myself. We were on the road again as dusk settled in and full-on dark was not far behind. As we careened along, I cursed myself for sitting at the front of the bus because the lights of the other vehicles speeding toward us—changing lanes even when we were barreling at them—made me realize that everyone in the country was addicted to playing chicken and I was in the hot seat. We reached Limon just as the sky began gushing water in earnest. The driver didn’t care; he had a schedule to keep. I stood at the corner as he and Jim deposited our bags, looking helplessly at the four massive totes filled with tools, clothes and books, which were getting heavier by the second as they absorbed the torrent of water cascading from the sky. The town was eerily quiet given the squall that was ensuing so Jim went in search of someone to take us to our destination. I argued, of course—scared out of my mind to be left alone in the pouring rain, a sitting duck for any weirdo that might happen by. Fortunately, no one ventured out in the weather and he came riding up in a tiny pickup with a bird of a black man behind the wheel within fifteen minutes. We loaded the bags and crammed into the front seat of the truck. The man was extremely sweet, seeming embarrassed that it was necessary for his hand to touch my thigh each time he maneuvered the stick shift into position to scoot us along.Call me negative, but the beginning of this stint in the jungle didn’t bode well as far as I was concerned. I wouldn’t have dared to verbalize this opinion, of course, because I would only be treated to Jim’s scornful glare. Within a few minutes we stopped in front of the Episcopal Conference Center. The small-boned man heaved our bags out of the truck-bed like they were feather pillows. Jim tried to pay him for helping us, but he refused, telling him to say hello to “Mr. Gus and Miss Gertrude,” the caretakers of the center. As he opened the truck door to slide behind the wheel, he threw up a high wave. The busted lenses of both taillights ringed the exposed the bulbs, which glared a hazy white as he disappeared into the throat of the storm, in rosy halos. He had certainly been our guardian angel that night.If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Like Dead Bubblegum
Jim returned from Costa Rica completely frustrated because the government had impounded the truck he’d sent. He spent the entire four days trying to extricate it but the bureaucrats wouldn’t budge, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was detained at the airport when he was trying to return to the states. It took an intervention by the Bishop to get him out of hot water and on his way home.
As was the norm, the setback didn’t keep him down for long. The Sunday after his return, we were commissioned for our next project during a church service. It was his birthday, which he said was a good sign, and his energy intensified as we met with a handful of excited volunteers who would be helping us. He was truly in his element when he was engaged in either the planning of or the physical manifestation of a project.As he ramped up his efforts to organize the trip, I made my way through The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, studying assonance, alliteration and allegory, as well as noting the definitions of odes and ballads on the pages of my notebook. Iambic Meter was a world I’d never given much attention, and the marks indicating accented and unaccented syllables in poetic forms had many of the pages looking as if I’d been practicing hieroglyphics. I was turning out some pretty surreal work at this point, most of it so dark it’s difficult to read now. I didn’t value it as important until recently, maybe because it was wearing me out to continually record so much angst: I amble. Softly thinking.Nothing to worry. No
reason to hurry. Mind’s eye
winking. I ramble.I pine. Sadly missing.
Feelings of home. I feel
so alone. No one kissing.
Tears shine. I suffer. Sweet soft darkness
of the mourning. Trouble’s
warning. Of the blackness.
No buffer.I decide ending’s dancing.
Courting happiness. But
not in this mess. Beginning’s
laughing. I hide.I stumble; I push positive.
Slowly it flies. Bleak, darkened
skies. Coupled negative. It
rumbles.I travel. Back to my world. See
all my goodness; or see
all, my goodness! Light
unfurled. My gavel. I judge. Life’s cruelness strips
my days. Confused, my
ways. Lashing rudeness. I
fudge.My sense of humor was only slightly intact, as this entry in my notebook proves: “Sometimes I take my past/ and roll it around in my mouth/ like dead bubblegum./ There isn’t one of the thoughts/ I’d care to meet in a dark alley/ each in their fractured sum.” It was written the week before our return to the mission field. If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
I'd Cared Too Much
Since my epiphany on the airplane during our trip from California, I’d been doing a bit better at protecting some time for writing. I’d finished and submitted a poem, my first attempt at publication, to Byline Magazine. It was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s book of poems I’d found in St. Augustine.
Upon Reading “The Complete Poems of Ernest Hemingway”I sat in Northgate Burger King
with Ernest Hemingway;
washed in concentration,
shades of “oily weather” gray.
Complete Poems this book claims.
I wish I could agree.
They’ve resurrected his every word?
Not one thought scrambled free?
Wasn’t there a phrase, perhaps,
from his repertoire deleted?
I’d like to think just one
unbound sentence floated,
incompleted,
to piles of crumpled paper
liberated by revision.
The scratchings of his pencil
sent it flying from submission.
I’d like to think his wastebasket
was full from time to time
of pieces of young Hemingway’s
attempts to make words rhyme.I’d barely managed to finish the poem before we were on the road again, and our last stop in Atlanta to run the Peachtree Road Race brought the flurry of social activity to a halt as we prepared to return to Costa Rica. Jim went on a quick trip to San Jose because he’d shipped one of the company’s beat-up F-150 pickup trucks there so we’d have our own vehicle. It took me two of the four days he was gone to settle into the modicum of quiet his absence brought to life. I spent the mornings finishing May Sarton’s book, which I’d put aside during the crazy travel time because it was difficult to read about her dropping into the quiet of her writing life when I had few opportunities to do the same. Not that I wanted to see another writer suffer, but her struggle showed me there was someone else in the world that felt as deeply as I did, and this soothed me. “Cracking open the inner world again, writing even a couple of pages threw me back into depression…How to summon the vitality needed?” she wrote in mid September. How many times had I asked myself that very question?By early October, she declared, “Once more poetry is for me the soul-making tool. Perhaps I am learning at last to let go, and that is what this resurgence of poetry is all about.” In her next entry—made the next day—she lamented, “It has been stupidly difficult to let go, but that is what has been needed. I had allowed myself to get overanxious, clutching at what seemed sure to pass, and clutching is the surest way to murder love, as if it were a kitten, not to be squeezed so hard, or a flower to fade in a tight hand…It’s a real break-through. I have not written in sonnet form for a long time, but at every major crisis in my life when I reach a point of clarification, where pain is transcended by the quality of the experience itself, sonnets come.” I continued to read about and study poetic forms, making notes in my writer’s notebook about the poets I’d been reading. I studied the structure of the sonnet and felt it was far beyond my ability. I made notes about other poets’ preferences. “Frost was given to quatrains, couplets, and other set forms, not inventing new measures,” I wrote, though unfortunately I didn’t record where I’d read it. Quotes like these are wedged between my fumbling attempts to turn my own ideas into poetry: …The chimneys impale
a night-washed sky,
forcing themselves
on the velvet darkness.
They are symbols
I cannot touch;
the laughter gone,
I’d cared too much… If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Interruptions, Nourishing and Maddening
I had mapped out the details for a second trip to California in celebration of our wedding anniversary. It would be an orchestrated drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Huntington Beach, staying in bed-and-breakfast inns along the way. I was eager to walk the beach in Carmel again, and I had decided to take Robinson Jeffers’ poetry with me—intending to read his words during our drive south. This, as it turned out, was impossible because Jim took the undulant coastal road at record speed, always the one to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible rather than to stop and “smell the roses” (or in this case “snap any photos”) along the way.
I was fascinated with the outcroppings dotting the coastline—the dark gray rocks dribbled artfully with runnels of dried white excrement beckoned me to photograph them, especially when the crescendo of Pacific waters slapped at their sides and plumed skyward in the stiff breeze. After the first few stops I managed to wrangle, Jim began playing hardball, telling me that I’d already taken a photo of a view exactly like the one we were zipping past. If he’d been able to gauge nuance, he’d have seen that this was simply not true. The queasiness from the first day’s drive didn’t let up until after dinner when I settled in with Jeffers between the cool, crisp sheets in our room. The language was the perfect complement to the day’s drama. In “Clouds at Evening,” he wrote: Figures of fire on the walls of to-night’s storm,Foam of gold in gorges of fire, and the great file of warrior angels:
Dreams gathering in the curded brain of the earth…As I drifted off to sleep with his images in my head, I thought about how I’d imaged the trip being the starting point for a host of languid memories. As it was going, I surmised it would likely be one big blur and in the end I was right. It wasn’t until I took my seat on the plane for the trip home that I felt steady again. Though we’d be going much faster than Jim’s driving took us, at least there was the illusion that I was relatively still for more than a few minutes. I wanted to journal about the trip but the experiences coalesced into one log hopscotch. As we reached cruising altitude, what came spilling out surprised me: “There is a journey that can be taken if one has the insight to hear its call. Once the journey has begun, there is no turning back because the sense of awareness that is gained cannot be reversed. Once the knowledge has been absorbed, the mind cannot throw it back without repercussions.” Oddly enough, my next sentence was, “There is something you’re not telling me.” I’d packed May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude for the trip home and I opened it with the peevish feeling that I was at the cusp of a precipice. This, from the first page of her book, took me closer to the edge: "I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange—the friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations.’"Though I had been feeling there was no balance in my life for a while, awareness ripped through me like a bolt of lightening. Perhaps it was hearing a successful, published author say it that made a difference, but it was suddenly clear that because the quiet, creative times were missing, I couldn’t possibly enjoy the social whirlwind of my life, regardless how fun the activities were. Until I found some type of equilibrium, there was no way this would change…If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for taking the time to read this post!
The Small Joys
Our traveling reached a fever pitch as winter turned to spring. Jim loved being “on the go” so we crisscrossed the country in planes, trains and automobiles—Colorado morphed into Panama City, and a drive down the coast road of California was wedged between trips to Atlanta.
My writer’s notebook held longing: “I want to get past the point of simply existing everyday; I believe the attitude of ‘just get by today by doing the minimum’ is what has made me lazy. There is much to do and it is time to develop initiative so I can accomplish what I want to achieve. I’d like to be very directed in my writing but have enough flexibility to have fun when lighthearted times are at hand. The problem is, as I see it, I am doing neither very well.”As was customary, we were hosting a boisterous group for Memorial Day weekend. One of Jim’s best friends had bought the condo next door so our crowd had grown to twelve. We grilled whole Red Snapper on the decks, tanned ourselves on the beach and made the restaurant circuit from Seaside to Apalachacola. Though I had planned to be up early every morning so I could journal before everyone else awoke, I didn’t always make it. The mornings I did manage it, the crew trickled onto the deck one-by-one, bleary eyed and hung-over from the late nights and the copious alcohol. With all the revelry, I created very little material and this is the lone entry worth sharing:The ocean rolls and tumbles, following the buffeting wind onto the beach. White foamy peaks appear as far out as my eye can see. Tossing and turning with restlessness, the water crashes in on itself like a bad dream. “If I were a fabric, I would be a plaid, an itchy wool,” it says, “a rough cross-grain of texture, threads in diverse paths woven together to form an ill-fitting coat—oversized and too heavy to be comfortable.”I was reading Savannah by Eugenia Price and I recorded this passage from the book in my notebook one morning while the sun was low on the eastern horizon and the house was still quiet: “Aunt Nassie always said, ‘Too much money can be a hindrance.’ She’d always had plenty, but she tried to live as though she didn’t. Which meant, as she saw it, that she tried hard not to miss the small joys no amount of money can bring to anyone.” The next morning, I recorded this observation on the same page: “There are words and there are sentences, and if you have the good fortune to whisper a few that make a difference, you’ve discovered something beyond success.” This accomplishment would certainly be no small joy!I turned to nonfiction after I’d finished the novel and enjoyed Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet, particularly her philosophy about teaching writing: “I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. As I have said, nobody can teach creative writing—run like mad from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; or can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.”L’Engle quotes Henry James, who recommended, “Render, do not report.” She notes that the beginning writer finds it difficult to carry out her commands, especially this one: “Describe this room in which we’re sitting, and make use of all five of your senses. Don’t tell us. Show us.” With this in mind, the description of my experience in Steamboat in the previous post became this: "The tapping of my pen increased in tempo as the music turned from serene to upbeat. I noticed how the edges of the flames, intent on their ardent dance in the fireplace, softened when I stared fixedly at them. The smoky aroma they produced as they devoured the wood was intermingling with the yeasty smell of fresh-baked French bread, its piquant flavor a pleasant memory, and the bracing scent of the new-fallen snow that had heaved itself farther up the cold surface of the sliding-glass door the night before. I moved my palm along the cover of my book, the nubby fabric dragging against my skin, and bowed my spine into the cushions in the hopes that the embrace of the plush corduroy would ease the ache I felt inside."If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Breadcrumbs
I’d been grabbing every free morning I could for creative journaling and studying poetic forms but with winter came Jim’s hiatus from the trail so they grew fewer and father between. While he was off pheasant hunting, I began the somewhat unencumbered week with an admonition and a commitment:
"I am growing restless with my inability to sit down in the mornings and write something, anything. The sentences do not offer themselves for sacrifice and I, mute and offended, cringe on my corner of the sofa—waiting to hear that my time is up from the self-imposed imprisonment. I believe I must be worrying too much and that this worry is stifling my creativity. I must learn to free myself from these inner pressures or I’ll never be able to turn out a consistent flow of work, good or bad. I want to concentrate on consistency for the next week—putting words on paper with an understanding that quality has nothing to do with the intended goal." It was Ueland who gave me permission to think this way when she advised, “…if you write fast, as though you vomited your thoughts on paper, you will touch only those things that interest you.” I loved the idea of just letting it fly but I felt so perpetually shy. I thought of Hemingway and about how he’d felt hesitant before he hit upon the idea of focusing on “one true sentence.” I wondered if he’d ever cringed at the idea that his unedited scribbling could be published someday. I felt I had to get past the idea that everything I wrote would be seen in order to circumnavigate the self-consciousness that was preventing me from writing anything. But how? I knew that my writer’s notebook would be the very first step, the foundation for all the growing and blooming I would do in the future: "It is on these pages that I must begin to nurture and love my writing, letting the blue lines and black ink open a world of positive challenge. This is an important part of my education. I can learn a great deal from reading but it will be the scattered words in this book that will serve as the breadcrumbs left along the path of my journey as a writer that will lead me home to myself."I decided I’d never leave the house without a book in my purse because there were ample “stolen” moments for reading as I ran the endless errands that kept an active life moving along. One day I stopped for lunch at Burger King and pulled Hemingway’s poems from my purse. As I sat at the Formica table reading the lines that sprang from such a virile psyche, I felt the testosterone ooze from each word. “Driving, throbbing, progressing. The sea rolls with love,” he wrote in the poem “Oily Weather.”I took the book with me to Steamboat Springs where one of Jim’s best friends owned a house. He would invite the same couples each winter for a rollicking time of eating, drinking and snow skiing. The first to awaken one morning, I stood at the plate-glass window enjoying the soft glow of the foggy world lit by streetlights—the spots of illumination dotting the snowbound scene with auras the color of White Zinfandel. I stood and marveled at how the adventuresome souls migrating in the wagon trains that drug them westward during the gold rush had managed to tolerate Mother Nature’s frostbitten embrace during the winter months.The sky seemed so much larger in this cowboy town than in any other place I’d seen—not only wider but bluer (or grayer when the snow squalls moved in). A magpie flitted across my field of vision, its black-and-white gypsy garb giving it away in the monochromatic world. Camp robbers they are called—vagabonds in habit and in dress. Before long, a group of them had gathered in a nearby tree, roguish in their brash daring as they taunted each other. As they huddled around the bird feeder on the deck, they scattered most of the seed, which turned to tiny flecks of black and tan on the pristine snow that rose high above the railing. For all their freedom of flight, they were anchored to their mountain world and its frigid sky, and nothing held their attention more forcefully than the flask of food dangling from the soffit of the house.We had just received news that we’d be returning to Costa Rica to build a new church in the village of Zent, another jungle outpost on the Caribbean coast not far from Puerto Limon. I was already steeling myself for the emotional fallout, dreading how seeing the struggling people there would trigger me. In No Man Is An Island, Merton wrote, “We make ourselves real by telling the truth…We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.” I wholeheartedly believed this, but how could I possibly tell my truth if no one within earshot wanted to hear it? Would I have to burn my entire life down in order to be able to whisper what was real for me?I’d begged off from skiing and spent the morning on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, reading back over my notes from Ueland’s book. It was as if she, Merton and the entire cadre of writers throughout history were putting me on notice. Ueland wrote: "…to write happily and with self-trust, you must discover what there is in you, this bottomless fountain of imagination and knowledge. [My diary] has shown me that writing is talking, thinking on paper. And the more impulsive and immediate the writing the closer it is to the thinking, which it should be. It has made me like writing." If only I could find this self-trust and come to know my truth, I’d be in a much better place, I thought, then chided myself for always focusing on such a big picture that I remained frozen. I decided to return to baby steps, telling myself that the first footfall must be something simple like capturing the ambiance of the room:"The ambient music is creating a pulsing mood. The flames gorging on the logs fill the room with a hint of woodsmoke—the acrid aroma intermingling with freshly baked French bread and the crystalline smell of falling snow fusing fresh, clean, warm and smoky. I let my hand stroke the cover of my book and pushed my spine deeper into the plush sofa cushions. The warmth of the blanket covering me complemented the comfort of the house and the quiet world buried in snowfall."If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
