A Writer's Spirit: The rhythm and disruption of walking

My bat

Yesterday I was out for a hike in Arkansas when a huge butterfly fluttered into my face. It startled me, and I waved it away, barely brushing the tip of its wing with my hand.

And then I really looked, and even though it was early afternoon, gorgeous sunlight all around, that was no butterfly. It was a small reddish-brown bat.

Touching a daytime bat: that’s a gift to a writer. Heck, I’d buy a book of poetry with that title. It’s a real thing that happened, and it’s just begging to be forged into a metaphor for something. Sometimes we do this—we brush against the daytime bat, that thing we had no reason to look for, right there beside our hand ….

But this time around, I’ll keep the bat instead as a mere diary entry, as a thing that happened one beautiful spring day, in that state where almost anywhere you step, there might be a stone chamber beneath us.

Writing forces me to sit at a desk quite a bit, but I love to get out into the woods to renew myself. It’s a family thing; if the weather is reasonable, my whole crew tromps along a dirt path together.

When I walk, I’m always looking downward. I’m fond of snakes, and I’m always hoping to see one. Snakes belong to two worlds, and when they reveal themselves, they bring news of that other place, the one beneath the surface.

I almost never see them, for all my looking. I don’t have that kind of vision. My friend Sherri does. She knows how to look when she’s in nature, and she finds the most astonishing creatures, even though most are designed to stay hidden. I lived in the same town as Sherri for a long time, but I forgot to ask her to help me learn to see. I live in southern Missouri now, and I clomp through the woods all the time. There are snakes everywhere, and lizards, and salamanders, and fabulous bugs. Once, and possibly twice, I did see a tarantula, skittering off the path. Astonishing, this—when I moved here, I never would have dreamed they were all around me, better able to spot me than I them. Sherri would see them. I wish I had her gift.

I don’t walk to exercise, although it’s fine for that. In this, I’m like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, “The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours … but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” Thoreau was a big proponent of walking as a tool for improving our capacity for reflection—exercise being a bonus but not the aim of the activity.

Mind you, I’m no Thoreau. Rain keeps me in. So does a chill in the air. So, sometimes, does laziness. I don’t walk every day, although I’d like to be the kind of person who does. 

What I know about walking is that its rhythms lull us into meditation, more quickly and naturally and surely than focusing on our breath can do. And as we walk, we see things—we add to our catalog of reference points and memories in a way we can only do outdoors, away from the familiar. I can stay inside and watch classic TV and have an enjoyable time, but the downside is that no bat will stare into my face, and no tarantula will hide from my feet. Neither will I spot a celt or spear tip—other things I undoubtedly walk over and miss almost 100 percent of the time. (I’ve only ever found one arrowhead, and it was chipped at the tip, blunted, I don’t know when. Maybe it snapped in the ground, or maybe it was discarded by its creator, more annoying than deadly if launched. These are the notions the walker considers.)

Unlike time spent in our interior spaces, which become quickly and permanently familiar, walks—even along accustomed paths—always take us somewhere new. Thoreau knew this, too. He wrote, “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect to see.”

It’s true. Last week I was walking and found odd, closed, white lilies everywhere around me. I hadn’t seen anything like them before; it was a strange country, and I found it by training my eyes downward. (My friends helped me to identify them as white toad lilies, but I’m pretty sure, having seen yellow ones yesterday, that this isn’t quite right. The blossoms I saw were smaller, more singular, and more frail. I think it’s most probable that these were my very own flowers, scattered along my path by some benevolent creator just for me.)

Walking is restorative for anyone, but it has special benefits for writers, who seek at times both rhythm and disruption—both part of any amble—and who require a library of adventures and reference points if they are to have anything to commit to the page.

Walking gives these to me every day. Yesterday reminded me of how a breeze moving over water cools, how a collapsed cave roof can look newly fallen even after the passage of a millennium, or how a sturdy-looking stepstone sometimes sits atop a fulcrum in a stream.

And it taught me something new about bats, which, I just read, sometimes hunt during the daytime in the spring, when nights are cold and bugs are scarce. Have you ever seen a bat nearly snatch a moth from midair? I have. I’ve been that moth, and every single day I am that bat.

A Writer's Spirit: Building a meditation habit

It’s Lent, and I’m not Catholic; nor do I currently belong to a Protestant congregation that distributes ashes or fasts for the occasion, or even follows a liturgical calendar. But I’m up for any occasion for self-study, and when Lent rolls around, I try to find my own way to connect with the Divine.

I’m not one to deprive myself of anything I enjoy. As someone without a full-time job and benefits, privation for me is daily—and unremarkable. I’ve learned as much from it as I’d like to. There’s no need to cut out that daily cup of coffee when you drink Folger’s at home. 

When Lent rolls around, I’m more likely to adopt a habit for a period of time, and I try to make it one that I’d like to sustain for a lifetime. Sometimes these habits actually do stick; forty days or so is a sufficient period of time to begin a new approach to life.

My current Lenten practice is daily meditation—a longtime goal of mine. It sounds easy enough to make time each day for silence and breathwork, but the reality is that I put it off and lose the day’s opportunity.

It’s also very difficult to get alone time in a house with kids. A four-year-old sees a person sitting on the floor, and that just means one thing: play. The other day I was sitting, my hands on my knees in gyan mudra—that is, raised, my thumb and forefinger touching, my other fingers straight—when a cascade of Legos rained down on my palm.

My son likes making buses. This is what he calls anything with wheels, and these are such unlikely structures—elaborate staircases or towers or cages driven by leprechauns and superheroes, with minifigures lined up inside, eager for school.

I recently shared a social media post where I expressed regret about my difficulties with a meditation practice. In it, I mentioned that I was relying on guided meditations—and falling asleep halfway through.

My friends were so supportive. Several commented that guided meditations are perfectly good, and that I shouldn’t beat myself up for sleeping, and that following the lead of my body just made sense.

But I have a goal for meditation. I’d like to get in touch with myself. I want to be still and quiet with myself. For me, most days happen with the television on in the background; there’s a hockey game in front of me right this minute. (Go, Blackhawks.) A guided meditation can be a route to mindfulness, but to me it’s an extension of my usual state of passivity. There is something in me that is reluctant to accept an invitation into the silence. My relationship to my inner self is best described as wary detente.

This uneasiness with self infects my poetry, too. It’s why I most frequently write small poems that feature contained ideas. Longer poems are longer meditations, in reality—they’re just meditations that happen on the page. I don’t find poetry particularly fun to write, and even a small one takes a lot out of me.

So it would be good to build a habit of contemplation this season—good for my spirit and good for my writing. But some days the best I can do is accept what falls into my hand—to take those blocks and build a vehicle, something weird and fanciful that can carry me and my son to some other place, right here on the floor, together.

A Writer's Spirit: Fir gives way to forsythia

I took my Christmas tree down Thursday. And yes, by “Thursday,” I mean three days ago—March 2, second day of Lent.

I had briefly considered replacing the Christmas ornaments with Easter eggs. I grew up in a place where people decorate the trees in their yard with eggs for the Easter holiday—a practice I understand to be somewhat regional and maybe a little odd to people from the outside. But let’s be honest; the Valentine tree never materialized, and the twin impulses that led me to keep the tree up (laziness and busyness) kept me from cutting out hearts, pasting them to paper doilies, and re-decking the tree.

If there’s time to re-deck, there’s time to de-deck.

I’m a little torn as I analyze my tardy removal of the artificial tree. Is this a marker of mental health, or might it be a symbol or metaphor? Like everything we have a hand in, it’s probably both.

Truth is, I have all of the usual associations with the Christmas holiday. It represents family and childhood and promise. The tree sparkles. It’s lit. That wrapped gift could be the thing I’ve been waiting for. The few minutes we spend tearing into boxes could become my child’s favorite memory. It could happen.

And in fact it can happen. I think of that lovely monologue by Bill Murray as Frank Cross at the end of the movie Scrooged:

It can happen every day, you've just got to want that feeling. And if you like it and you want it, you'll get greedy for it! You'll want it every day of your life and it can happen to you. I believe in it now! I believe it's going to happen to me now! I'm ready for it! And it's great! It's a good feeling, it's really better than I've felt in a long time. I'm ready.

I guess I wanted that feeling. My friends know my situation; I don’t really have a regular workplace, and I’m a little isolated in the city where I live. I turn a lot of my attention toward home and family—well, toward family anyway. I’m always forced to take a triage approach to life, and housework consistently falls at the end of my list, as the Christmas tree probably hinted at.

Initially, the tree was beautiful. The cat liked to climb it. I liked to sit in the grace of its gentle colors at night when the rest of the room was dark. It served its actual purpose, which, I guess, is draping its bulk protectively over our gifts like a piny mother hen.

Even after Christmas—even a month or two months after Christmas—I enjoyed it, a fact which makes it far less depressing. I liked turning on those lights and sitting near it to read or write. I liked the rustle of the ginger tabby hidden inside. I even looked being able to throw a little clutter behind it when there was an unexpected knock at the door.

I would be perfectly happy to have a lighted tree in my house all the time, were it not for those sad Santa ornaments everywhere—the arboreal equivalent of green fuzz in the fridge, announcing its own outdatedness.

And I am prone to mild depression, which is lucky—I’ve had the serious kind, too, and I’ll take a case of the bluey-blues any day over the bedbound anguish of deeper sadness. It’s a more pleasing symbol of my inner state than a sweaty, rumpled bed.

But I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think it’s sadness that kept my tree up. I think I wanted the same thing that was desired by the first person to pull a fir tree into the house and append some candles to it.

Winter can be hard. Not even the sun can stick it out—and so there we are, a sweater not enough to keep out the cold, a lamp no substitute for the afternoon sun. A mild winter, the sort we just had where I live, is not much better; it lacks the grace of snow to cover our errors and muffle our noise. All it offers is the dark and chill.

But there are buds on the lilac bush outside my window, and a few daffodils have popped up in the lawn. A few days of fine weather—sunny weather, shorts weather—have broken through the gray scrim. They’ve made me brave. Forsythia is happening, and even when I’m in my home, it casts its own remembered light.

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A Writer's Spirit: The pull of intention

Living with intention: That’s my project these days, and as a writer, this means writing with intention. Furthermore, as a writer who aspires to reach and impact as many readers as I can, I’m working to keep the writing constantly at the fore of the things I care about.

Today is a good example. I have a habit of making things-to-do lists during church, the part of the week where I am most deliberate about embracing hope and possibility. It means I’m not listening closely about half the time, but that’s OK, too—the brain acts like a sieve, and the important parts catch, and that’s when I listen closely.

Today’s list of tasks is quite a long one, and I don’t see anything on it that can wait until tomorrow. I have two grant applications that need to be completed by the morning. Some teaching and grading work is overdue—work that risks inconveniencing students, who are already overloaded. There are freelance editing tasks to finish and jobs to apply for, both sooner rather than later, and on top of all of this, I’d like to love my kids and clean my house—and I wouldn’t mind watching the Oscars.

But the thing I’m attacking first is this blogpost, and there is a reason for that—one that I’ve written about in the past. Writing is my driving force in life, and when I put writing first, everything falls into place.

Until recently, intention has been … well, intentional for me. It has been a project that I have worked hard to accommodate. I’ve had to deliberately order the items on my list and make sure writing was at the top (sometimes with a little arrow to boost it from where it occurred to me to include it). I’ve also had to make a literal space for writing to happen—a desk, a table, a corner of the couch.

Here, in the universe, I’ve arranged both space and time to accommodate my writing, to allow myself to receive inspiration like a visitor. I’ve made doing this a habit, and inspiration does visit daily, exactly like a familiar friend. Whatever else is going on, I chisel a gap and I step into it and writing is there, ready.

While I was noodling in church, a song played, and few words of its lyrics were caught in my sieve. It was a tune that was familiar from my childhood Baptist days—the kind of hymn we almost never sing in my Unity congregation—and it said something about silently calling.

When I was eight and Baptist—a religion that was already a terrible fit, and not just for me, but for my mom, who merely dropped me off at that church and picked me up after—the lyrics were different, and it was called “Open My Eyes That I May See.” I like the tunes of these old hymns, although the “wretch like me” talk is a little galling (I’m no wretch, and you aren’t, either). Likewise, the constant construction of God as male (Father, He, etc.) seems silly. Still, something about these hymns transports me.

Today we were singing the words “Silently now you call to me,” and I forget the rest of the lyrics, but I’m sure they had to do with our private ability to connect with our universal source (a very Unity-like concept). This sounds so much like my experience with writing, though—no matter how busy I am, I experience this “silent call,” although I find that wording a little ridiculous. It’s more like a pull—a source of gravity, a private planet.

The pull gets stronger the more I honor it, and I can get swept up in it. I lose time to it; I fall away from my physical self.

And that’s why I put it first. There is so much to do! And yet I may as well try to avoid the gravity that holds me to the planet as avoid the need to write.

This is the result of intentionality, which is only beginning to pay off. I’m eager to see where it takes me.