It is the prickling air that wakes us up…
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily Elizabeth Bishop
It’s the end of national poetry month and I didn’t read much poetry. Poetry, I’ve said before, is slower and words ask for more attention. This morning it was raining though and I went to Elizabeth Bishop’s Intimate, Low-Voiced, Delicate Things and read her words. The title makes me think of flowers. The fritillaria, narcissus, hyacinth and muscari bursting from their bulbs in neighbourhood gardens, some patches cropping up in unlikely places.
Fast appealed to me instead for most of the month. After I sent my final chapter in for review, I wanted to devour bad tv and read fiction quickly. I was craving narratives that stayed with a character for a long time. Story, which lingered into the core of a thing. I’m finishing Sally Rooney’s A Conversation with Friends. She’s so adept at capturing the interior psyche of a character and she has this acute ability to make car rides or sitting on couches epic dramas full of heartfelt tension.
Lately I’m very aware that everywhere I look someone is trying to sell something and that most people with a SM page or website or online platform is usually directing me to something happening that involves participation or purchasing. I don’t like the pressure this brings.
I am afraid that if I don’t post to my grid I won’t be real and that is terrifying and absurd. I am afraid that if I don’t share my own private writing there, I can’t say I’m a writer. I’m worried that if I stop sharing stories online in video form or erase my SM pages that I will no longer exist and that the people I follow or who follow me will no longer reach out. This is not the world I grew up in, but this fear of being forgotten is definitely not new.
I grew up in a world of worms on sidewalks after rainfall, capturing frogs from ponds, eating rhubarb from my mother’s garden, stuffing my small chubby face into lilac blossoms and drinking in their fragrance. I danced around playing dress-up in my mother’s shoes, tore my jeans so they frayed and biked to Becker’s behind the farm fields near the cul-de-sac. I watched my sister climb the red maple. I spent time carrying stones around in my t-shit pouch, hoisting them like treasures to inspect their strata. I pinched my ears with clothespins as if they were clip-on earrings to know my skin was mine.
If I didn’t share the sausages and grapes I made the other night do they exist? They sizzled in white wine and I brought the fatty fennel pork to my tongue.
I post less and less and I gain less likes. The algorithms don’t like it. Making my instagram profile private gave me a little power to turn people away or let them in and that makes my numbers decline but I like the power more.
Today marks the day we moved from Hamilton to Halifax, a year already. I’ve never been so aware of my need for connection and so I find myself scrolling a lot but it’s never what I want. I see people being “active” online and I think about how I wrote nothing wasting time there. That I walked into my bedroom aimlessly and when I got there wondered why I was there. Was I going to brush my hair, again? Look at my reflection, again?
Someone in my mentor group last term said “you seem like a very private person.” And when this was said I got prickly and shell-like. I covered the sticky squidgy inside. “Yeah, I guess I am,“ I replied. Then I went on wondering how I will ever sell a book or make it in the hustle. I know that’s not the point of writing, but I do want to share what I’m working on with a reader. This space between reader and writer is sacred.
Sometime during this month I thought, I’m not sure I want to be found. I’m not sure how I’d feel if I knew my book was being published tomorrow. Maybe there’s a secret part of me in the close place next to my ribs that wants to remain unknown.
I oscillate between this thought and knowing I will have to get better at putting work into the world to be a writer. Then I work this out with friends, probably over-sharing to my people. When I received my final grades for this term my colleague said, “brag to me,” and I picked the skin around my thumb, then dug my nail under the blue shellac polish, letting it lift up before breaking it off. Now I have half-painted nails.
April 22 was earth day. Another opportunity to let people know online that you are paying attention, I did this. I made sure people knew how much earth means to me. The garden and the natural world has been balm for me through difficult times. It’s saved me over and over in moments of distress. It’s taught me about impermanence and that being close to death is often what brings about an undeniable awareness of life. Its rhythms help me know that everything passes and changes and shifts. That no feeling is final, but we need all the feelings — the sad. The happy. The fear. The hope. The doubt. The courage. The disappointment. The relief. The love. The grief.
Dawn always follows a dark night but the dark night gives us a sky lit with stars.
I thought I was writing a book about my love affair with nature and though that’s still part of it, it’s so much more than that. The love affair is a sliver to a much larger story, one deep in my marrow with sunsets and scars, sagging and splits, stars and squish. It’s a story as old as time itself (okay maybe that’s too far). Still, I can’t wait to share it with you.
In April I refilled the bird feeder. I, like Ada Limon, have also become concerned that the birds are too dependent on the feeder now. I fill it, it empties. I fill it again. They are “more human than bird” as she says, in their desire to be made whole by something from outside. Insatiable. I am like them and though I don’t want to be (I’d like to be content). More often than not I’m ashamed to admit my ravenous appetite. There are the rare moments, when I roll out my yoga mat, light some candles and incense, take deep long breaths, feel the air filling my belly and as I twist ringing out my internal organs, tension is released and I feel there is nothing more I need to add to myself. I savour these moments. It happens when I’m lost in writing or arranging flowers or immersed in a recipe or seeding the garden. I forget about my self, my worries or efforts, and I find myself taken up into a sort of good disappearance, moving to a communal rhythm.
I spotted a blue-throated black bird — a common grackle in the rhododendron bush, during my morning coffee. He was stunning at first until I realized why he was likely looming about, to devour the other bird’s eggs. Prowling around my yard on the hunt for the blue eggshells in a Robin’s nest perhaps.
I didn’t like this grackle even though it was striking and I shooed it away.
Over brunch my partner and I discuss the puffy stomach of robins. We discover they are not that way because of pregnancy; they are fat because they’re cold and fluffing their feathers helps with warmth. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, other than I had no idea. I’ve always assumed otherwise, a stupid naturalist.
When earth week came I found myself writing in my journal, “what is this fucking book?” I went outside and put the bird bath together and sat it beside the lilac tree, hoping that would help me know.
And then, sitting on the beach next to my friend colleague, feet in the sand for the first time this season, I dared to utter the words I wrote in my notes just a few weeks back. A possible new title for my book. The shape and form of it in the words. It’s not the book I set out to write and it’s not the poetic clever title I thought I had. I didn’t want to speak the words out loud because then they would be real and this would be the shift in direction I need to take the manuscript where it seemed to be going. A real, “ah hah” moment. Then, I said them and I proceeded to explain what it is, I pitched my book, effortlessly on the sand to my friend and she exclaimed, “I LOVE IT!” Then that night on the other side of the computer screen with my sister, I told her too. I read her my pitch, this thing that just flowed out of me like water and she cried, happy knowing hope tears. And she said, “that’s so much more expansive and so much more like you.”
Over dinner in my hyper state of whimsy, I sat across from my partner and said, “I think I finally know what this book is about and it’s not at all what I would have set out to write, but it’s what I’ve been writing.” And I told him and his eyes flashed, proud beams, the championing solid kind that is his love for me, and he said, “That’s your book. That’s it!”
I did not proceed to write much after this epiphany. There’s a clearer project description blossoming and some more notes to myself in my phone. I did however begin to see threads in my stories and connections. In my writers group I wrote a very tender piece about powerlessness and will. The beginning of a longer chapter, I think.
Out on a hike the day I wrote that piece, I was overcome by the flutter of the silvery blue butterfly. That’s not just its description, but its name. I spotted a few flying around over mossy stones on the treaded path we took to Tea Lake. My partner walked on ahead of me while I followed the flicker of blue, only available to the eye when its wings were open. Otherwise the silvery spotted body blends with the terrain.
There’s something about this concealed decadence. This internal glow of silvery blue flashing when in flight that caught my attention.
I spent a lot of time walking the Salt Marsh Trail this month. It’s one long path with ocean on either side and something about how clear the sea is there and the knowing of where to walk has been comforting. We almost ran over a male ring-necked pheasant driving home as it scurried across the road, tail like a sword.
Yesterday was warm enough to open all the windows in the house. I put laundry on the line and took all the herbs I’d brought inside over the winter back outside. The dirt from the plants had built up around the windowsill so I cleaned them and the house smelled fresh like lemons on my tongue. I seeded hollyhocks, larkspur, calendula, borage, coreopsis, cosmos, godetia and poppies. I raked a seed mix mailed to me by The Seed Saving Project, where I saved and donated sweetpeas to them last fall. This surprise bundle my gift in return. As I did this, a red-bellied woodpecker swooped down from the oak tree to my feeder, swinging on it happy and full. A welcomed startle. I’m naming these birds and flowers because naming matters, in writing and in life.
The new direction of my book surprised me. It came to me quietly with a note I left in the margin of a book I was reading. It was almost so low-voiced that I ignored it. Even when I utter the title now, there’s something common about it, which reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem and her question that I find myself so drawn to lately: “Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music […], some intimate, low voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world.”