You stumble upon a random letter on the path. You read it. It affects you deeply, and you wish it could be returned to the person to which it’s addressed. Write a story about this encounter.
Today’s twist: Approach this post in as few words as possible.
Okay then. Being as I am not a fiction-writer and am instead more of a quasi-memoirist, and seeing as how I have never actually had this experience of stumbling across a random piece of correspondence, I’m going to have to take a bit of a sideways approach, here.
I will, however, try to adhere to the suggestion about keping things short — which is a thing that does not come naturally to me. But, like some smart guy once said, brevity is the soul of something-or-other.
———-
“atlantis is sinking but paradise is not lost”
This graffitied phrase was on the foundation of an abandoned structure not too far from my Philly townhouse. I never knew what the structure had been, or what spray-paint poet had left this inscription on the vestigial remains of concrete and I-bar. But I would walk that route often, and the phrase was something I absorbed at a cellular level.
Some versions of the legend of Atlantis talk about the city as a paragon of enlightenment, beauty, creativity. A place of such technological advancement that it was brought low by the gods — either because the Atlanteans sank into greed and hubris, or because the gods themselves didn’t want the competition of dealing with such evolved beings. Either way, the island was swallowed by the sea, never to be seen again.
The metaphor, to me, was obvious. Your current endeavours or creations could all be wiped away by a wave of Poseidon’s hand. Yet new options, new opportunities will always emerge from what appears to be flotsam and jetsam. That’s a faith I hold true in my heart.
Eventually, the old structure and its message were themselves brought down: making way for the parking lot of a new condo building. (I’m sure there’s a Joni Mitchell fan or two who can appreciate the irony of that.)
But I still carry the words tattooed in my heart. Atlantis crumbled, but paradise is not lost. Paradise is never lost.
———-
Final tally: kept it to less than 250 words. For me, that’s a fucking haiku of concision.
The Day 4 prompt for Writing 101 is loss. Any kind of loss, from heart-wrenching to flippant. The extra twist: write so that this piece can be the first installment in a 3-part series, as opposed to the “one-off” posts that populate so many blogs. (Now that piece of advice amused me especially, considering the endless ways my posts speak in interwoven dialogue to one another. I think the comments field on JALC have more ping-backs connecting my different posts in conversation with one another than I have actual comments from people!)
During the hours between seeing the prompt and sitting down to write, I wondered whether I’d talk about my father’s death. After all, JALC was birthed during those first months of shock and grief, and we have just recently marked (or not marked, as the case may be) the fifth anniversary of his passing.* Ultimately, that didn’t sense as the way to go.
Instead, a meditation on how I parted ways with graduate school and the ivory tower.
———-
Sometimes a good ending is prefigured by a bad beginning.
Not that it seemed like anything bad at the time. Indeed, when I was on the verge of beginning my Ph.D. program, it looked as if — to quote a piece of adolescent dystopia — the odds were ever in my favor.
What’s not to be happy about? An Ivy League program, full graduate fellowship, and I received the offer letter so early in February that even my professors were shocked. Even while waiting for and weighing the other offers that came, having that one letter in my hands meant that, even if the details hadn’t quite been settled yet, I had my life all wrapped up and figured out.
And there, I believe, lies the root of the problem. I had set myself on a course without enough self-knowledge to know whether it was a path that would truly suit me.
Or.
Did I set myself on this path so much as drifting there? After all, school and academics had been the only thing in my life at which I had truly excelled. During the public school years, the fruits of that natural talent were made bitter by the shames and embarrassments of not being talented at the right sorts of things — the prettiness, social, and popularity scales. Once I was at college, the environment was one that more fully valued my intellectual gifts. Why wouldn’t I think that it was the environment where I was meant to stay for the rest of my lifetime?
And so, whether by aimless drift or by self-deluded intention, I was going to become a professor.
Never mind the amazing naïveté of the choice. My complete lack of understanding about what a professor’s life and work actually are like. My false sense of limitation around how school and classes were the only environment where I could be successful. My immaturity in thinking that I would perceive the cloistered nature of academia as a safe cocoon rather than a strait jacket.
I was going to be a professor. Until I realized that no, I wasn’t. I really wasn’t.
[Set-up] Okay, the Writing 101 folks are definitely on a roll with their advocacy of free-writing. Today’s prompt (Day 3!) is partly about a topic, but it’s mostly about committing yourself to a daily, full-out free-writing practice, a la Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones — no stopping, no editing, just allowing yourself to lose control and get beyond the self-censoring into the marrow of things.
Now, I don’t necessarily have a complaint against this notion in the abstract (says she with the daily morning pages/soul writing practice). I’m less convinced about my willingness to post that level of unexpurgated free-write out for all to see. For me, the thing about free-writing is exactly the way it functions as a safe space to be messy and uncontrolled and just blurt out every molecule, knowing that you can then build on the raw passion and bring in craft and shape and structure. (Do you know how hardKerouac worked to craft that “spontaneous voice” in On the Road?!?)
But anyhow, I’m going to play the good student, set my timer for 15 minutes and type like a madwoman (in the attic?) on the topic at hand. After that, I’ll decide whether to hit “publish” or to save the free-write content as a private artifact while shaping a public blog-post.
Oh, and the topic? “Write about the three most important songs in your life — what do they mean to you?” [/Set-up]
This is as unfair a question as you could possibly ask. Only three? You have got to be kidding me. With as important as music has been in my life, the idea of narrowing my life down to a jukebox with only three 45s in it is simply ludicrous.
But here’s a first thought. “Carol of the Birds” — French, maybe 14th or 15th century? It was the first time I sang a solo in a choir/stage performance. 3rd grade (we were Brasil at the time, not that that’s a pertinent detail), preparing for the Christmas concert. This was back in the days that schools still had music programs, so a Christmas concert was a regular kind of event. And the full “choir” — elementary classes — sang verses 1 and 3, with then little old me singing verse two. I honestly can’t remember at this distance whether there was an audition, whether I was just selected, whether I shared the solo with another girl. I just remember it being the first chance I really sang on my own in a public performance, and, for better and for worse, that was the start of the many years of singing and performing I have had to this day. With the love of music and expression and also all the greedy ego-desire for the spotlight and for acknowledgement. It’s such an obscure little carol that I have at least one CD in my holiday music collection that I keep primarily because it has a version of that carol on it. (Not that the rest of the CD sucks, it’s just a generally unexceptional playlist and performance style. But then this one song with all the depth of personal meaning and memory it inspires for me.)
During all my reading around the Isla Vista murders, I somehow stumbled across an article about Tori Amos and her song “Me and a Gun,” and the way it’s served as a galvanizing inspiration for women to share their own stories of sexual assault and sexual violence. Having said that and implied I might be writing my own similar thing, I’m actually going to take a slight left turn and say that the Tori Amos song that’s ringing in my head since that story is actually “Silent all These Years.” It has some of the same tone of surviving past traumas and finding one’s voice. Which are both things that speak pretty deeply to me. Thinking of the ways I’ve talked, at least obliquely, at some of my past patterns of keeping myself contained and hidden, and the stumbling efforts I take now and again to find ways to speak the truth. (I hate saying the phrase “my truth” because it has a bit of self-indulgent “new age” tone to it. Like, let me inform you about MY truth and therefore ignore your lived experience and perspective. Though saying some thing is baldly THE truth doesn’t really do any better at ALL to ease the idea of denying other perspectives and experiences.) Anyhow, “I’ve been here, silent all these years” is ringing in my mind’s ear. I was here all along. Keeping silent, but I was here all along.
And why don’t I go the somewhat cliched route and talk about a wedding song? Our first dance was to Jason Mraz’s — what the hell is the title? this is fucking embarrassing. I can hear the tune in my head.
Okay shift. Let’s think about “Here Comes the Sun” — the James Taylor/Yo-Yo Ma arrangement that was the inspiration for our wedding musicians (flute and guitar) for a key moment in the ceremony: taking two roses from separate vases and then putting them in a vase together to signifying the joining and interweaving of two lives into one. Simple and somewhat cliche, and at some level you’d kind of expect it to be a little silly, since we’d been living together for 5 years or so by the time the wedding day rolled around. And yet this simple piece of ritual was incredibly moving and meaningful, and then as we stood holding each other’s hands and there was still a whole lotof song left to listen two, both Mr. Mezzo and I came close to finally losing our cool and becoming soggy weeping-with-joy sorts of messes.
And that’s a good stall tactic, but I still can’t remember the Mraz song.
“Oh you done done me [. . . ] so hot that I melted.” Trying frantically to come up with more of the lyrics so I could maybe get my way to the title. This is really embarrassing. Anyhow, whenever we hear the song come on the radio, we normally dance for a t least a few seconds’ time. We’ve done that in grocery stores, in the middle of cooking, all kinds of unexpected moments and places. So I guess it’s not the title or the words that are most important to me. It’s that feeling of hearing the particular lilt of rhythm and melody and then celebrating.
Buzz!
[Post mortem] I am constitutionally unable to send this out into the world without at leastcorrecting the spelling errors — because otherwise, I’m not so sure this would even be intelligible as English. Beyond that, I’m going to let this go up as-is, not especially ‘cos I’m thrilled about it but because it’s an insanely busy week at work. Started editing at 4 AM this morning, will have to do the same tomorrow, so there’s just not enough awake minutes left in my system for me to come up with a better alternative.
Oh? And here’s the song I blanked on. Unsurprisingly, the title came back to me within 90 seconds of that damn buzzer ringing….
[Bookend] So the first prompt for Writing 101 is a simple one: free-write about anything you want to for 20 minutes, and then copy that free-writing into a blog post. Here’s where the synergy between pen & paper journalings and blogging work to my advantage. I was thinking today as I wrote my morning pages that there was blog-post fodder in there. Little did I know how quickly that blog-post would be taking shape, and how (mostly) un-edited an exploration of the topic it’d be…* [/Bookend]
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you.
~~ Pharrell Williams, “Happy”
Okay, I am wrestling a bit with the happy/complacent thing. I definitely appreciate how in the last couple of retreat weekends there’s been an emphasis on reminding us to claim our love of life. More specifically: claim the way I love mylife (not just life in general). I feel the importance of that, the way it’s something that moves beyond the victim identity. (And I’m realizing this happy/complacent thing could turn into a blog-post, and Connor’s language about victim mentality gives me an easy entree that doesn’t require me to give up all the secrets and intricacies of the center’s teachings.) And I’m conscious of the ways my classmate noticed my habit of deflecting happiness around the current state of things — always saying something like “There’s still more to study,” or “I’m still me in it, so I have a lot to keep learning.” So it’s interesting to me. I can feel a little bit about how that niggling piece of dissatisfaction, the eternal questioning, could be an expression of the victim-self. Always looking at my life and finding it wanting, rather than appreciating it fully today, exactly as it is. So I’m wondering how to have a fuller appreciation for all of the ways I have been given (have helped build?) a really good life. Really feel the gratitude of that, a certain peace of mind.
And yet. I don’t want to sink into complacency. I don’t want loving my life to take me to the place where I think I’ve arrived. Where I allow myself to fall asleep in my privileges, to play princess in the castle. To believe that because I’ve been gifted with a good life, I can just enjoy these comforts and stop studying, stop growing. Wallow in my privilege and to hell with anyone else and their challenges. So that’s part of what i fear will occur if I were to permit myself full-on happiness with my life, rather than the milder happiness-with-a-question-mark (or happiness-with-a-caveat) that I usually permit myself.
It’s an interesting level of self-distrust that fear conveys. If I’m “too happy,” I’ll get lazy. But if the study, the writing, if this all comes so naturally to me — then is the fear even remotely on target? It feels rather way off the Soul’s Truth of things. Like if I can more fully trust and honor the ways I love the learning, the ways I love awakening (both on an individual and a collective level), the way my Soul Ph.D. is connected (at least in part) to the gathering of knowledge and the synthesis of all these facts and articles and insights that come my way. If I can more fully trust that, then there’s a space to trust that if I were to be fully happy in my life, then I would move more fully into my soul’s natural expression. So allowing myself more happiness with loving my life could create space for more gathering, more learning, more awareness. Possibly see the potential here as loving my life being an awakening movement, rather than an anesthetizing one. Wow. Definitely a new angle on the proposition.
[Bookend] Thus endeth the free-write. More than 20 minutes’ worth and without the super-messy on-ramp of my opening paragraphs. Not quite as coherent and well-transitioned as the posts I normally try to write, but as a kernel of an idea, not all that off-the-mark from other things I’ve written here. Cool! [/Bookend]
* I did make a few silent edits, to protect the privacy of a couple individuals and fill in an extra clarifying word here or there when I had drifted toofar into speaking my own private language. I definitelyworked to keep those edits to a minimum.
Five years ago,* I started this blog to create a space for my self-education about fat acceptance, within the larger of context of my ongoing work to increase my capacity for self-acceptance and self-love.
Three months ago,** I came back here to continue that project, but with the more specific goal of using the structure of blogging to remain awake and in the study of my HCG experience as a detox journey, providing a quiet counter-narrative to the usual emphasis on HCG as a weight loss tool.
With the end of my HCG protocol, I’ve been a little bit wondering where to focus my blogging. The Isla Vista killings have provided a temporary focus in the 10 days since I completed my HCG experience, but I know I won’t be spending the rest of my writing life unpacking that one incident and its ramifications.***
So, once again, I’m grappling a bit with the question of “What am I doing here and what is it that I have/want to write about?”
I’m glad to say there’s been no pull towards stopping. I know to my bones that there something in the structure of writing here that has been beneficial for me. But a lot of the the conventional wisdom around blogging — find your niche, stay on target, use it to pitch yourself/your company/your products — just doesn’t mesh with where I’m at.
You see, I have no plans to be monetizing my blog in the foreseeable future. This is perhaps a self-evident statement considering my low reader count, my merely-half-hearted efforts at amplifying posts via social media, and my only-just-beginning level of effort to read all the other great writing out in the blogosphere and participate via follows and comments.
So, aside from the quirkiness that is me, I don’t entirely know what my niche is. And my interests are potentially wide-ranging enough to completely obliterate any hope of “niche” or “focus” or “staying on target.”
I’ve decided to take part in The Daily Post’s Writing 101 blogging challenge, in hopes that that structure might give a playground to help explore some of this territory. I’ve been looking over some of the archived prompts from recent Blogging 101 and Blogging 201 challenges, and I’m thinking some of those topics might also be fruitful tools for this exploration. (Even if I remain quitefuzzy around what it means to think about establishing a “brand” in this non-business non-monetizing headspace I’m in around my writing.)
I haven’t seen the first Writing 101 prompt, so I’m not sure how easily they’ll mesh with the other sorts of topics I want to be exploring. I dostill have more ruminations sparked by Isla Vista, and then there’s events elsewhere in the world that alsohave me Thinking and Feeling things. If the prompts don’t interweave readily with the ongoing threads of my writing, I’m not quite sure how I’ll handle the time management required by “doubling up” on my posting.**** (And let’s not even get into the fact that I’ve also started re-establishing the daily ritual of morning pages/soul writing.)
I’ll figure all this writing out, one way or another. If nothing else, I can cut back on TV or embrace a little bit of sleep deprivation in my June….
* Give or take a month or so.
** Give or take a week or so.
*** Although there are legitimately a LOT of ramifications that could productively bear some examination.
**** Luckily, WordPress’s scheduling functionality allows me to stagger when things go online — like this very post, which was written in fits and starts over the weekend but has been scheduled to “go up” late Monday morning, East Coast time.
This graffitied phrase was on the foundation of an abandoned structure not too far from my Philly townhouse. I never knew what the structure had been, or what spray-paint poet had left this inscription on the vestigial remains of concrete and I-bar. But I would walk that route often, and the phrase was something I absorbed at a cellular level.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 