a helpful exercise

Even though I set myself a deadline, I find myself taking frequent breaks to watch the hearings on a live stream on my phone. There are so many of these hearings I’ve quit keeping track of what they are. At any rate, they all contain the same cast of characters leaning forward into mics, foreheads furrowed, cloak of righteousness and/or indignation. When they break for lunch or duties or press conferences, I write furiously, try to keep my characters from suddenly becoming indignant and/or righteous and/or spiraling into hopelessness at the demise of everythingtheyeverbelievedaboutdemocracy.

At regular intervals I have to stop and wrestle with the idea that two people, equally desirous of justice, can watch the same never-ending hearings and draw different conclusions. My brain does not want to accept this. Even now I do not want to write this down. I want both people to see the truth. Which is the way I see it. Which is the way all reasonable and justice-loving people see it. On my phone screen is a montage of interviews which defy my desire. A teenage girl in a Woodstock t-shirt flips off an alt-right reporter, a woman with hair the color of old foam scowls to a news network, it’s all a pack of lies and machinations. I make a mental note to use “machinations” in a sentence sometime soon.

I think about what I’ve learned from the Benedictines and the Buddhists and Mr. Rogers and the Pacifists, how everyone has goodness in them and it is our work to find and welcome it. I think about how peacemaking is listening and understanding the other side and I think how I’m tired of hearing the other side and I just want them to quit being wrong but I know that somewhere out there someone is thinking the same about me, and I stop for just a minute and sigh.

I take a break for lunch. The geese have been sleeping on the porch and I shoo them away. It is almost about to rain but I put on my boots and get the old broom and sweep away the mess they’ve made before a delivery driver or a neighbor decides to drop by unexpectedly as they did last week and had to tiptoe around piles of goose shit to reach the front door because I was down in my office writing my novel and didn’t know there was shit happening on the porch. I feel like this is a metaphor for my whole life but I don’t know exactly what it means. Also, I think, while I’m sweeping, that DISTRUST is the common denominator. None of us believes anyone anymore, so we go with the narrative we’ve already been constructing for a long time. This makes sense to me. My whole novel is about the fallout of broken fidelities. I decide that lunch is a bowl of peanut butter and chocolate chips and get back to work writing with renewed purpose.

On the checklist for “How to Be a Writer,” is point number 3: “Know who you are writing for.” There is a helpful exercise accompanying it: “Write a paragraph that states clearly who you are writing for.” This reminds me of the old Slylock Fox comics in the Sunday paper. “How to draw a Fox: Draw a circle. Now draw a square. Now draw a Fox.” At first I was discouraged, because how can I be a writer if I cannot even complete point number 3 on the checklist? Over time, I have realized that the exercise, like Slylock Fox’s drawing instructions, is pointless. You do not discover your readers by paragraphical declaration. You discover them by process of elimination. Is anyone still around after you have written your truth? That’s who you are writing for.

The hearings are done for the day and so now all there is left to do is reconstruct a future for myself which does not include despair. I write some more and I think about the readers who will read this novel and understand what I am saying about shit and cloaks of indignation and disbelief and truth and that little thread of hope that keeps us moving forward and I don’t feel quite so bad. Maybe I even feel like these are the machinations of hope: to be as real as we can be, to keep ourselves from easy categorizations, to make art, and conversation, and mistakes, and stands, and contradictions (I am large, I contain multitudes), and sense, and love, and dinner. I think about how much I want something to trust in again, and I look outside and see the geese are sitting on the porch and so I shoo them away and find the broom and I think, well, there’s that.

what's working

In some ways, shifting my focus is like starting a brand new job but going to the same old office. It’s hard to make new routines in a familiar place. For two decades I trained myself to accomplish certain tasks on certain days in a certain order. (Old habits and old dogs come to mind.)

My family and I talked it out.

“I need specifics,” I said. “What do you need me to be doing?”

“Handle the food,” they said. “The rest we will split up.“

OK. Just food and words. Food and words. I can do that. I can do that. During the day, when I start to get distracted by other jobs, I stop and ask myself if what I am doing is related to feeding my family or to my writing career and if the answer is no, I have to stop doing that thing and get back to work. I’m like a graying kindergartner. ;)

But, some things that are helping me focus on the real job:

1. Listening to and reading about writers and their work. Melissa turned me onto the Commonplace podcasts, which are long, lush conversations between poets and artists about how their lives and work entwine. Every time I come across someone whose work interests me at all, I chase them around the internet for awhile and read whatever I can. (Then I tell myself, we are doing the same work, these people and me. They have bodies and families and houses and demands and they get the work done. You can too.)

2. Starting the day with a little ritual: journaling, exercise, then reading poetry out loud to myself. (Currently working through the latest Poetry Mag, as well as Kyce Bello’s gorgeous new book, Refugia.)

3. I just added another practice to that last week, inspired by Kortney’s Ursula project. Copying one poem a day into a copywork book. Something about reading the work aloud then writing it out by hand fires up the creativity in my brain. I’m ready to get to work!

(On the food front, today I’m making this lasagna for dinner. It’s the kind of thing I can make in stages throughout the day and will provide lunches for tomorrow! Win.)

tonia

P.S. working on the newsletter this week! But it might come out a few days later than usual. I’m sooo close to meeting my goal of finishing the draft of the novel this month! Wish me luck!

Martinmas

I love that Martinmas and Veterans Day coexist on the same day (at least in the U.S.) Even as we remember the sacrifices women and men have made for their country, we’re reminded by St. Martin, the Roman soldier who became a Christian and then refused to kill, that there is a third way we can choose. (And this reminds me as well that although religion has been used to justify enormous amounts of persecution, war, and violence through history -and is still doing so now, God help us - it can also be a catalyst for conversion and peace. Anyone else need that reminder?)

When my children were at home, we always made Martinmas lanterns and hung them from the chandelier for a candlelit supper. Many other children and families take their lanterns on a walk through the night. I think it’s a lovely image to represent Martin’s witness to peace shining through the darkness of war and oppression.

On this day, I also like to spend time with other pacifists. Since I don’t really know anyone in my everyday life, it means revisiting the writings of William Stafford, Walter Wink, Thic Nhat Hahn, Leo Tolstoy, Vera Brittain, Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others. I think most of us who come to pacifism and nonviolence arrive there after a struggle between what we know to be true internally and what the rest of the world is determined to make us believe. Having a day to remember those who have stood courageously against the tide of public belief is a lovely gift.

So Happy Martinmas, my friends! May we be reminded of what is possible and courageous enough to believe in peace.

***

This would be a great time to revisit Desmond Doss’ powerful story. And here’s a poem from William Stafford, who spent WW2 in a Conscientious Objector’s Camp:

Learning

A piccolo played, then a drum

Feet began to come - a part

of the music. Here came a horse,

clippety clop, away.

My mother said, “Don’t run -

the army is after someone

other than us. If you stay

you’ll learn our enemy.”

Then he came, the speaker. He stood

in the square. He told us who

to hate. I watched my mother’s face,

its quiet. “That’s him,” she said.

prayer for the first week of Lent

Dear...God,
I told a friend about praying and she said, "To Who? The Universe?" and laughed (though not unkindly) because she knows about my latest trouble with names and I know she would feel so much better if I could just use the Name we're used to because something like "The Universe" feels too big, too uncontainable, I think, which is kind of the point for me, but I understand that it might be scary when what you really need is a friend on the other end of prayer and not some un-nameable Being or Force or Love-Who-Always-Reaches, which is the shape you have taken in my mind lately.  There are those pictures of the Milky Way - you know the ones? with the velvet sky and the scatter of stars across that rumpled skein of color? - which always make my heart stutter a little because I think that is where you are but also above it and around it for billions of miles, maybe an eternity of miles, and also below it and close, close as the space between one heartbeat and the next, close as the threads between my thoughts, plucking them every so softly, till they tremble, till they resonate with the goodness that is you and is always recognizable, always knowable,  even though I cannot, maybe don't want to, name you.

unchaste

The only part of a woman God

didn't want

was her mind.

I wore my skirts below

the knee,

cultivated piety.

But at night I dreamed of

words

that coupled

and twined,

bore dangerous offspring,

chimeric and untamed.

I woke panting,

repentant,

eager for sleep.