That title also happens to head one of my favorite poems written by Thomas Hardy. In it, he reminisces about, and immortalizes, his final years with his wife before her death and laments that he could have cherished their moments together more while they were taking place.
My title sums up the end of a different type of journey, however, namely, the finishing of another book. And now I am enjoying the calm but richly full feeling of fulfilment and that accompanies the completion of any accomplishment. It strikes me, though, that no journey, be it literal or metaphorical, ever really ends, for there is never an ultimate destination beyond which we can no longer move. All roads lead somewhere, but they also all lead back to where they started, opening up even more possibilities on all sides.
So now, I stand here at the end of this long walk, seeing lots more road ahead of me, as well as all the different other directions I might have headed off in. For writing, like roads, is never final. There is never a "last word," or a true "The End." Words are audible and visual forms of energy. And if words should ever fail us, like the energy that enables the flower or the tree to mesmerize us, they won't die but simply lie in wait for the next traveler upon which to attach themselves.
Like a cat moving along through underbrush unwittingly gathering seeds and other bits of potential new plants, I move along gathering ideas. For now, I will pause and take stock, assess and reevaluate. And then, before too much more time elapses, I will pick up my walking stick and set out anew to see what awaits me there along the many secret paths which are, as long as I am able to travel them, all mine and mine alone.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Unhappy Endings
Sometimes, I go back and reread some of my writing, and I come away thinking that my themes might be construed as sad or even depressing. While I am fully aware of it this, and many cases, it's not actually intentional. But as most writers know, a piece of writing can start out in one tone and quickly veer off into another, with no help whatsoever from the writer other than what his or her unconsciousness contributes along the way.
Water flows downhill and always seeks those egresses that are below it. That doesn't mean that some of kind of deterioration happens along the way. In actuality, the water may even become enriched by whatever it picks up along its downward fall across rapids or as it snakes its way through woods that crest a hillside. Story plots often behave in much the same way, quickly taking a plunge at the first sign of a low spot, and then rushing on toward the sea, which, in this case, is represented by a stack of pages or a computer file that constitutes the whole body of thought gathered finally in one place.
Here's the thing: writers are constantly advised to "write what they know." And in my case, there haven't been all that many happy endings in my life to draw experience from. So how can I write about something that I'm not all that familiar with? Sadness, on the other hand, in the form of suffering, death, disruption, abandonment, rejection, tragedy, and any other manifestation of loss in between...yeah, THOSE I know a lot about, so it's not surprising to me that my stories would assume an aura of loss, sadness, or misfortune.
For a writer, the actual act of writing is an exercise in exploration. For as we type or write, we discover new things about the world, about other people, and about ourselves. Sometimes, too, we remember things that we might have thought long buried and forgotten. But the act of writing requires an expenditure of energy, and energy, as we all know, is everywhere at once, filling the large and the smaller spaces equally, and in this case, insinuating itself into the tiniest crevices between our buried thoughts and impressions, often bringing them back into the light without warning.
How often have I sat here writing when, all of a sudden, a sentence or a phrase pops out at me in full print that I didn't consciously compose but that seemed to materialize out of nowhere, small shards of memories I'd suppressed or that were crowded out by more immediate concerns. And if they happen to be sad, then that's where the catalyst of that phrase lived for a very long time before it decided to become part once again of a greater whole.
While writers expound often upon events of the past, the actual act of writing is happening now, in real time, giving new life to old impressions and bits of tales generated from experience and perception. I envy anyone who is able to tack a happy ending on to his or her stories. But I suspect that, more often than not, loss and sadness, which seem to leave much deeper and more indelible tracks on the human soul, are much more familiar to a much larger audience.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Water flows downhill and always seeks those egresses that are below it. That doesn't mean that some of kind of deterioration happens along the way. In actuality, the water may even become enriched by whatever it picks up along its downward fall across rapids or as it snakes its way through woods that crest a hillside. Story plots often behave in much the same way, quickly taking a plunge at the first sign of a low spot, and then rushing on toward the sea, which, in this case, is represented by a stack of pages or a computer file that constitutes the whole body of thought gathered finally in one place.
Here's the thing: writers are constantly advised to "write what they know." And in my case, there haven't been all that many happy endings in my life to draw experience from. So how can I write about something that I'm not all that familiar with? Sadness, on the other hand, in the form of suffering, death, disruption, abandonment, rejection, tragedy, and any other manifestation of loss in between...yeah, THOSE I know a lot about, so it's not surprising to me that my stories would assume an aura of loss, sadness, or misfortune.
For a writer, the actual act of writing is an exercise in exploration. For as we type or write, we discover new things about the world, about other people, and about ourselves. Sometimes, too, we remember things that we might have thought long buried and forgotten. But the act of writing requires an expenditure of energy, and energy, as we all know, is everywhere at once, filling the large and the smaller spaces equally, and in this case, insinuating itself into the tiniest crevices between our buried thoughts and impressions, often bringing them back into the light without warning.
How often have I sat here writing when, all of a sudden, a sentence or a phrase pops out at me in full print that I didn't consciously compose but that seemed to materialize out of nowhere, small shards of memories I'd suppressed or that were crowded out by more immediate concerns. And if they happen to be sad, then that's where the catalyst of that phrase lived for a very long time before it decided to become part once again of a greater whole.
While writers expound often upon events of the past, the actual act of writing is happening now, in real time, giving new life to old impressions and bits of tales generated from experience and perception. I envy anyone who is able to tack a happy ending on to his or her stories. But I suspect that, more often than not, loss and sadness, which seem to leave much deeper and more indelible tracks on the human soul, are much more familiar to a much larger audience.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Cell Division
I admit it: science was one of my favorite subjects in school. And yes, I even liked dissecting dead animals. SMALL dead animals, you understand. Nothing bigger than a fish or a frog. I drew the line at a bird. Even then, I loved birds too much to want to see inside a dead one. Besides, my cat had shared that privilege with me himself on more than one occasion, so I needed no extra help in that department. That said, another aspect of science that I loved was biology, learning how things came to be, how they grew, evolved, developed. And once again, I can liken the craft of writing to a very basic biological function: cell division.
All writing starts with an idea or a small piece of an idea, genetic material, if you will. And slowly, over time, that idea starts to grow, with each bit of material dividing and subdividing again and again until the whole mass reaches a tangible identifiable form that comes to be known as A Story. Then, the process of accretion, as Isak Dinesen called it, begins, and the story starts pulling in what it needs to survive. Detail, background information, explication, narration, dialogue, reference materials, etc. etc. etc. And not unlike those blob-like creatures sent here from outer space in those wonderfully sappy 1950's sci-fi movies, The Story's mass enlarges, continues to grow and move about inside the writer's head and within his or her own experience, pulling in as much new material as it can which enables it to get even larger, until...until...
It hits the page or the screen with a loud SPLAT! And there, the writer's job is to tame it, to bring it in line, trap it within some predefined boundaries that transform it into something that readers won't run madly from.
I've nurtured three such creatures during the last few months, while a fourth is growing and feeding as I write.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Release the River
Working at an assisted living facility awhile back provided me with the opportunity to view life and its intricacies through the eyes of elderly people who were simply living out their final years as comfortably as possible. One man, who wasn't as old as the typical assisted living resident is but who had issues that warranted round-the-clock monitoring, told me something interesting not long before we parted ways. He said, "You see far, and you feel deeply." Later, when I thought about it, I realized that he had never had very much to go on to be able to form that opinion of me. And I was, needless to say, touched by his spot assessment of me.
I don't think there is a writer alive who could do what we do if he or she did not "see far and feel deeply." Writing is as public a display of emotion as is standing on a street corner screaming or crying or on a building ledge getting ready to jump. While it certainly is a more quiet and a less overtly violent endeavor, it is no less deep and no less sincere.
I will go out on a limb here as far as to say that pulling words from our brains is sometimes, if not usually, physically painful. It certainly can be draining, as is evidenced by anyone who has seen a writer push himself or herself back from a desk in sheer exhaustion. Writing is risky business, especially once the dam breaks and the words come tumbling out, not to be contained. We have no choice but to allow them to cascade down, as there is no hope of damming them up again until they've spent themselves and are nothing more than a trickle. And then, even if we do manage to block its path with a rock or a branch, whatever seeps into the ground is lost forever.
Or is it?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
I don't think there is a writer alive who could do what we do if he or she did not "see far and feel deeply." Writing is as public a display of emotion as is standing on a street corner screaming or crying or on a building ledge getting ready to jump. While it certainly is a more quiet and a less overtly violent endeavor, it is no less deep and no less sincere.
I will go out on a limb here as far as to say that pulling words from our brains is sometimes, if not usually, physically painful. It certainly can be draining, as is evidenced by anyone who has seen a writer push himself or herself back from a desk in sheer exhaustion. Writing is risky business, especially once the dam breaks and the words come tumbling out, not to be contained. We have no choice but to allow them to cascade down, as there is no hope of damming them up again until they've spent themselves and are nothing more than a trickle. And then, even if we do manage to block its path with a rock or a branch, whatever seeps into the ground is lost forever.
Or is it?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Words as Seeds
Gardening can be a funny thing at times. You plant something and it grows into what you thought it would; but other times, something else entirely comes up. Maybe a few wayward gloriosa daisy seeds got mixed into the marigold seeds, or the morning glories came up part morning glory, part moonflower. That's nature for you. Not always perfect but always always interesting.
Take the volunteer plants in the compost pile. You toss potato peelings in there, along with a few dead and shrunken pumpkin carcasses. And the next year, voila! The best potatoes and pumpkins you ever ate growing there unbidden, undrafted. One year, a small tomato plant appeared in a pot of soil on my porch, and not knowing what it was but allowing my curiosity to best me, I let it be...watered it, monitored it all that summer, until the characteristic blossoms emerged followed by tiny green fruit. And ultimately, I was rewarded with the sweetest most delicious miniature yellow pear tomatoes I've ever eaten. And that's nature for you.
And then there's another type of seed that isn't sold in packets or out of bins at the grain store. And you don't plant them in soil, which means none of the backbreaking work of tilling and feeding new ground in the spring when the earth is more muckhole than paradise. These seeds you simply scatter across a sheet of pristine paper or a shiny glowing screen, and then you sit back and let them take root.
Like their biological and botanical counterparts, they need regular feedings and watering. But these are again accomplished, not by conventional means, but rather by surrounding the naked seeds with imagination, pulling the soil of other ideas firmly up around their delicate stems, and then watering them as needed with tears and sometimes even with blood, a rather unorthodox approach to gardening, to be sure. And at the end of the day, after the tilling and the planting and the watering are done, you'd swear you'd put in a day's work in the broiling sun, slapping mosquitoes away and wondering if it is indeed all worth it.
And each and every time without fail, it is.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Take the volunteer plants in the compost pile. You toss potato peelings in there, along with a few dead and shrunken pumpkin carcasses. And the next year, voila! The best potatoes and pumpkins you ever ate growing there unbidden, undrafted. One year, a small tomato plant appeared in a pot of soil on my porch, and not knowing what it was but allowing my curiosity to best me, I let it be...watered it, monitored it all that summer, until the characteristic blossoms emerged followed by tiny green fruit. And ultimately, I was rewarded with the sweetest most delicious miniature yellow pear tomatoes I've ever eaten. And that's nature for you.
And then there's another type of seed that isn't sold in packets or out of bins at the grain store. And you don't plant them in soil, which means none of the backbreaking work of tilling and feeding new ground in the spring when the earth is more muckhole than paradise. These seeds you simply scatter across a sheet of pristine paper or a shiny glowing screen, and then you sit back and let them take root.
Like their biological and botanical counterparts, they need regular feedings and watering. But these are again accomplished, not by conventional means, but rather by surrounding the naked seeds with imagination, pulling the soil of other ideas firmly up around their delicate stems, and then watering them as needed with tears and sometimes even with blood, a rather unorthodox approach to gardening, to be sure. And at the end of the day, after the tilling and the planting and the watering are done, you'd swear you'd put in a day's work in the broiling sun, slapping mosquitoes away and wondering if it is indeed all worth it.
And each and every time without fail, it is.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Thursday, July 10, 2014
A Certain Clarity
Ah, the blessed relief that is the ideal summer day, the kind that warrants no loud buzz of artificial cooling or the annoying whir of fans, and that allows nature's sounds in. Gone, for the time being anyway, is the mirror-clouding haze of humidity, the dampening of sound, the slowing of the senses. In its place, a masterpiece of a day, in which all is clearly defined and unmistakable in its purpose...each leaf delineated against the ones beneath, below and above it...each bird song a top-forties-chart-worthy melody...the pond a blue that not even the sky could aspire to.
A wind hums in the trees as I write, providing the melody into which the distant sound of a lawnmower cannot intrude, with my wind-chimes adding their own melodious notes. Nature has arbitrarily decreed this day perfect, and who am I to argue? This is clearly a time to rejoice, if only within my own sphere of experience, in the tiny innocuous niche that I occupy.
This rejuvenation that comes out of the west via the ever-moving air masses imbues all that it touches, my own spirit included, with a new vibrancy, and reawakens my instinctive curiosity. I spy new depths among the greenery, new shapes which were hidden to me before, see new hues among the sun-drenched petunias, screen all of my sensory impressions like a 49'er to get at the jagged gleaming bits.
This is a day made for writers, for those processors of words who can take something like this and make others see without needing to utter the words "oh look!"
A wind hums in the trees as I write, providing the melody into which the distant sound of a lawnmower cannot intrude, with my wind-chimes adding their own melodious notes. Nature has arbitrarily decreed this day perfect, and who am I to argue? This is clearly a time to rejoice, if only within my own sphere of experience, in the tiny innocuous niche that I occupy.
This rejuvenation that comes out of the west via the ever-moving air masses imbues all that it touches, my own spirit included, with a new vibrancy, and reawakens my instinctive curiosity. I spy new depths among the greenery, new shapes which were hidden to me before, see new hues among the sun-drenched petunias, screen all of my sensory impressions like a 49'er to get at the jagged gleaming bits.
This is a day made for writers, for those processors of words who can take something like this and make others see without needing to utter the words "oh look!"
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Along a Journey
I suppose it's normal along any journey to come upon roadblocks...bright yellow tape marked, not with the words "police barrier---do not cross," but rather with something along the lines of "inspirational barrier--do not venture beyond this point." I read somewhere that distancing oneself from a piece of writing for a day, or two, or maybe even three, is actually good...good for the soul, good for the thought processes, and good for the motivation.
It's like any other trip I've taken. I come to a spot that doesn't look very familiar, and a sort of fear grips me that, if I venture any farther, I may reach a point of no return.
There is always, ALWAYS, that fear in writing...
So there is nothing else to do but to stop and ponder which direction I should proceed in once I get my steam up again. For there are usually many such directions, as many sometimes as there are sunbeams; but usually, if I wait long enough, one seems to beckon just a tiny bit more loudly, more insistently, than the others, just a wee bit more persuasively, and that is the one that I must undoubtedly take. Funny, too, how that presents itself at times. For when I get to the roadblock, I can't always see all the possible paths leading beyond it and away from it. It's like they're camouflaged by a dense riot of weeds and other unruly growth in a profusion too thick to be hacked through at the moment. And if I wait long enough, I usually don't even have to resort to that, can leave my pen sheathed, for the path that finally does open up does so as clearly as if it had been there all along and I just wasn't seeing it.
Then (and I've done this early in the morning when I first wake up), I say, OUT LOUD, "Yes, that's it! That's the direction I should go in from here on out!"
Until, that is, the next roadblock looms into view, the next bright yellow tape, the next tall hedge that I can't quite see beyond...
https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS/
It's like any other trip I've taken. I come to a spot that doesn't look very familiar, and a sort of fear grips me that, if I venture any farther, I may reach a point of no return.
There is always, ALWAYS, that fear in writing...
So there is nothing else to do but to stop and ponder which direction I should proceed in once I get my steam up again. For there are usually many such directions, as many sometimes as there are sunbeams; but usually, if I wait long enough, one seems to beckon just a tiny bit more loudly, more insistently, than the others, just a wee bit more persuasively, and that is the one that I must undoubtedly take. Funny, too, how that presents itself at times. For when I get to the roadblock, I can't always see all the possible paths leading beyond it and away from it. It's like they're camouflaged by a dense riot of weeds and other unruly growth in a profusion too thick to be hacked through at the moment. And if I wait long enough, I usually don't even have to resort to that, can leave my pen sheathed, for the path that finally does open up does so as clearly as if it had been there all along and I just wasn't seeing it.
Then (and I've done this early in the morning when I first wake up), I say, OUT LOUD, "Yes, that's it! That's the direction I should go in from here on out!"
Until, that is, the next roadblock looms into view, the next bright yellow tape, the next tall hedge that I can't quite see beyond...
https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS/
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