The Gift of Solitude: applicable to all adults, as described in a young adult novel.

If there is one thing I try to share with my students throughout the year, it's the idea that each one of them has a story: that you can never know someone's story just by looking at them, that it is one of life's greatest gifts to get to hear other people's stories, and that it is a privilege for me to get to know theirs throughout the course of the year.  My hope is that they will take the time to really know one another and build a community of understanding, respect, and kindness.  

And then I had a moment where I met a protagonist I wanted every student to know:

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay (page 6).

The only way I can navigate through my life is because of the 98 percent that every life has in common (page 77).

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love.  I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals.  I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious (page 142).

A handful of my students were raving about Everyday by David Levithan in our weekly "Friday Favorites" five minute share and after hearing the premise, I knew I wanted to check it out.  The protagonist, A, is essentially a soul (without a gender): s/he wakes up in a new body everyday while maintaining a fully developed sense of self--just no physical body with which to express him/herself.  This is one of the most thought provoking and creative young adult books I've ever read.  It touches on so many young adult emotional-development issues, but not in a preachy way: the protagonist authentically brings them up and because his/her life experience is so different than the average human, and based on what I've witnessed in my classroom, I think young adult readers will just soak it in.  

But I also found a section that spoke into everything I've been thinking about lately: maintaining a sense of self, of peace, of purpose.  He falls for the girlfriend of a [horrid] guy whose body he occupies for a day and then ends up maintaining a relationship with her--his/her first ever--though each day s/he is in a new body. S/he sees the stress she deals with and the broken, hurtful relationship she is in.  When s/he unexpectedly wakes up in her body one day, he decides to try to give her the gift of peace in solitude and goes for a long hike.  The description he uses is amazing: 

I've decided to give Rhiannon the satisfaction of being fully alone.  Not the lethargy of lying on the couch or the dull monotony of drifting off in math class.  Not the midnight wandering in a sleeping house or the pain of being left in a room after the door has been slameed shut.  This alone is not a variation of any of those.  This alone is its own being.  Feeling the body, but not using it to sidetrack the mind.  Moving with purpose, but not in a rush. Conversing not with the person next to you, but with all of the elements.  Sweating and aching and climbing and making sure not to fall, not to get too lost, but lost enough...When no one else is around, we open ourselves to the quieter astonishments that enormity can offer (197-198).

I meet monthly with some friends and we talk about the creative pursuits in our lives and what we are learning about ourselves in the process.  It has become a treasured time for me.  My November wasn't as creative as I planned: I made some substitutions for painting and calligraphy in the name of stress and exhaustion and travel, which at the time seemed justifiable.  I realized, though, that my substitutions weren't the same, even though I was technically "doing nothing." I realized once again that I need to spend intentional time opening myself "to the quieter astonishments that enormity can offer"--whether that enormity is staring at sky behind the branches of newly leafless trees, breathing in the scent of my Christmas tree, or taking out my paints and ink to let go and create.

Here's to a beautiful winter season filled with beauty amidst the darkness.

(And here are some other winter thoughts in case you, too, struggle with the fact the sun goes down at 4:30, or just need some context and/or hope from someone who is often winter-hopeless).

Winter Writing Inspiration.

I finally finished Cloud Atlas this week, but it's one of those books where now I need to process and think and research because David Mitchell packed so much into it.  While I gather my ideas, I thought I'd share some thoughts on writing, especially in the winter.

A friend and I decided over drinks a few months ago that we desperately needed to start a writing group--some accountability to actually put the pen to paper and to bring the pieces living in our heads to life.  We start next week.  As I've been trying to prepare some work, I realized I've done quite a bit of writing in this space about winter.  And then, serendipitously, another friend of mine sent me this blog post from the New York Times that starts this way:

In early winter, when the heavy rains come to the Pacific Northwest and we settle under a blanket of sullen sky, something stirs in the creative soul. At the calendar’s gloaming, while the landscape is inert, and all is dark, sluggish, bleak and cold, writers and cooks and artists and tinkerers of all sorts are at their most productive.

I do not live in the Northwest, but I live in a city where it seems I walk a half mile to get anywhere, bundled for winter as I have no car with an automatic starter or seat heaters.  I now choose warmth over fashion and can really only wear boots in the winter, always have a winter hat in my bag and find my shoulders most often pulled up to chin while bracing the cold.  Needless to say I prefer to hibernate and the lack of daylight only encourages this unsociable practice of mine.  I also love the nod to Seasonal Affective Disorder in the article.  (I finally bought a light therapy lamp this year.)

So, while you are waiting with me for warm days that seem so far away, read the article from the Times, join me and find your voice and your outlet: writing, painting, cooking, reading.  Winter is the most acceptable excuse to stay in with some kind of delicious beverage and get lost indoors.

in the company of those who struggle.

I came across Mary Karr's book Lit after I read an article in New York Magazine about her, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen.  I had read all of the authors except for her and sought out to get a copy of The Liars Club.  Then I found Lit, an incredibly written memoir based in Karr's alcohol abuse, the dissolution of her marriage and recovery, on a brownstone's stoop and decided that would work.   I later found out that a few friends of mine had recently read and loved it, so I moved it to the top of my "to read" stack.

{I've learned that sometimes I love to share the story of how I stumbled upon a story.  Thanks for indulging me.}

There are a few parts from Lit that I haven't stopped thinking about. One was that her recovery and redemption came in the company of those who struggled, too.  Karr found herself in AA with a mix of every kind of person imaginable, none of whom she would have sought out on her own.  The friends she made there were from across the social spectrum, people whose paths would have never crossed otherwise. And yet, they became a lifeline for one another because they deeply understood that struggle is best endured together. No one lives immune to hurt--and that means that each of us has something in common with every person we meet.  

I would not normally call myself a cynic, but in the winter it happens from time to time. For some reason that was the space my mind was inhabiting in the week I was reading this book: not in response to the book, but just in response to life.  I often get frustrated at the instagram-portrayed life.  Don't get me wrong, I think small moments of life's poetry are worth sharing, but sometimes it is easy to start thinking that everyone around has a perfectly curated life.  I know this theory is false.  Or, I start soaking in cynicism about the self promotion social media induces.   I've found that when I remember that I am always in (and a part of) the company of those who struggle, my heart seems to grow in compassion.  

I am always trying to teach my students that books make us better people because we learn to empathize with almost any character once we understand the ins and outs of his or her story.  Sometimes the teacher needs to remember this, too. 

 I also didn't realize just how much spirituality was a part of Karr's journey, and when added to a life rich in real community, a portrait of how beautiful--and simple--life can be rose before me. 

"Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past.  But the spiritual lens--even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day's actions--is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved," (304).

I really can't add much to her words, except that by allowing herself to consider, and ultimately accept, the way faith, not religious duty, could change a life, her life and mental landscape began to change.  Sometimes I forget this--and reading Karr's story became one of the brightest reminders of my winter--and my own cold weather induced cynicism and anger has begun to slip away.  

This year's winter.

First,  I have been in discussion with one of my best friends who also happens to be a teacher about how we always think of the "new year" starting in September. We realized that the main way we identify ourselves is through our job, which in many ways is great: teaching English combines so many of my passions.  It is generally hard for me to do a year reflection, because since I've never left the school calendar since infancy, January to me is the end of the first semester...the half way point.  It feels strange to think about 2011 because I had two different groups of students.  I had two different curriculum plans.  But. This is only if I look at my life solely through my profession.

Second, I caught myself spreading my winter blues this morning.  I've written before about my how my college roommate and I diagnosed me with Seasonal Affective Disorder online in 2001 and about how spring-forward is my favorite day of the year.  I've probably even written about how I blame the school calendars of my youth who had flowers decorating the month of March (obviously made by a southerner) for the way my heart starts to get prematurely hopeful for warmer weather.  However, my personal-not-job-related goal for 2012 (the first fourth of it, anyway) is to have a better attitude about the winter.  There. I said it. Please, if you see me, remind me of this.  

Another dear friend sent me an essay from a book called Let Your Life Speak many winters ago about living through the seasons as a polite way of telling me to get a better attitude.  I return to it every year.  It tells me: "Winter is a demanding season...and yet the rigors are accompanied by gifts: ...times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things...One gift of utter clarity as in winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque and see the trees clearly...Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being."  Another friend of mine moved to San Diego from New York and told me that perfection can breed complacency.  

So, I would like to live thankfully and intentionally this winter.  I realized the other day that I never posted about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids (which would have definitely made it onto the Top Ten).  I reread my notes inside and what I found has a direct correlation with how I want to live in this cold season: 

"...it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso...that pierced me the most.  His brutal confidence took my breath away." (11)  "I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself...Picasso didn't crawl in a shell when his beloved Basque country was bombed.  He reacted by creating a masterpiece in Guernica to remind us of the injustices committed against his people. When I had extra money I'd go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit before Guernica, spending long hours considering the fallen horse and the eye of the bulb shining over the sad spoils of war. Then I'd get back to work." (65)

"But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings could create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not." (11)

"He [Robert Maplethorpe] contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir," (13)

I want to stare winter down.   If it makes me angry, I want to do let that anger inspire writing.  Or to fight against it with dinner parties.  Or crawling out of my hole and stepping outside for a run with my friends and then feel as though I have thoroughly kicked it in the rear.  I want it to inspire me to actually live rather than hunkering down with Netflix instant streaming. I want to sense a stirring and stir.

this is not about books, but. winter made me smile. a few times. and that doesn't happen often.

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

A small child with a bowl cut running around an uncrowded East Village restaurant in full body snow pants. Also, the yellow walls and good people I was talking to there.

Multiple, separate, grown men who ran their fingers through untouched snow on a ledge in Midtown.

Bowery almost completely quiet in a snowstorm.

Eating fistfulls (yes, plural) of snow as I made my way home 8th Avenue in Park Slope. Because it was coming down so fast and I trusted there were no pollutants.  And it reminded me of Ohio snow.  And I liked it.

Hearing my landlord shovel the sidewalk and remembering all of the 6 am wake up calls my brother and I had to clear our driveway, whether we had a snow day or not.  Then rolling over and being thankful I didn't have to shovel today.

Prospect Park+over a foot of new snow+children sledding everywhere+evening light (albeit at 5 pm).  LOVE.

And, my students' artwork in response to "Do Not Go Gentle" by Dylan Thomas. It makes my room so bright I can barely contain myself.

so it *was* 65 degrees this week.

snow
as wintry mix
is
not
poetry.

Advent. Compassion. Or, and they will call him Immanuel.

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

The day the clocks spring forward and the days begin to grow longer, I rejoice.  My ankle length down coat can be packed away and I am free to revel in the spring, summer and fall.  Falling back, however, is not as easy.  I watch the sun sink behind Brooklyn at 4:30.  I have to wear coats and layers and put away my flip flops.  Curses.  I realized that when daylight savings ends, I begin to wait.  For five long, cold, bundled months.  I am not good at it.

Then I remembered today is the first Sunday of Advent, the season of waiting.   One of the best books I read this year that I did not post about was Compassion by Henri Nouwen.  Since I was thinking about it yesterday, I thought I would pick it back up and see what I underlined and it completely changed how I want to be spending the next four weeks of this season:

The virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel, which means God-is-with-us. Matthew 1:23  "By calling God Immanuel, we recognize God's commitment to live in solidarity with us, to share our joys and pains, to defend and protect us, and to suffer all of life with us."  Nouwen goes on to describe what the definition of compassion means to him: "It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull.  On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there."

Now I'm trying to figure out how all of these threads fit together, other than the word and thought association led me from one to the next.  I think it is this: I struggle so much with all that is a mess in the world.  I am constantly waiting to see things change.  But, I do not have to despair.  For this liturgical season of waiting, I want to be filled with this kind of compassion.  I want to remember that it is often in the waiting that we are most changed; that in the waiting is when our cup just might overflow.

Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things: a friendly reminder about daylight savings time.

I've been planning this post in my head for weeks. Today is one of my favorite days of the year, shared by two of my favorite Springboro alums and two of the maybe five readers of this blog, Kendra and Emily. Today is the day we can legitimately begin to hope.

Winter in general can be depressing: I should know as my college roommate and I diagnosed myself online with Seasonal Affective Disorder back in 2002 (that link is to The Mayo Clinic...see I am not just neurotic. It's real!) . Winter in New York can be even more depressing: no hill in my non-existent front yard to sled down, walking to work is not only painful (head bowed against the wind, face being whipped, etc.) but it is time consuming (buttoning all of the snaps on my ankle length down coat, putting on and the removing of layers of sweaters, fleeces, scarves, hats, gloves) and generally unattractive (see previous parenthesis). My coat takes up an entire seat wherever I go out and I have to shamefully excuse it as if it were an unruly child or socially awkward friend. Beyond the apparel aspect, the shortening of days that begins when all of the finery of autumn is gone from the trees is heartbreaking. The fact that we gain an hour of sleep when we "fall back" is crap! I'm a teacher and it is still practically dark when *I* leave from school in the dead of winter. But enough of this talk.

Today we may lose one hour of sleep, but what we gain is incomparable! Daylight savings means that we really can say that spring is around the corner and mean it, not the way my mom and I try to say it in the middle of January to make ourselves feel better. Spring! Is! Around! The! Corner! Starting today we can look forward to the fact that THREE GLORIOUS SEASONS IN A ROW are within our reach and that the hopelessness that begins on or around January first is at its farthest for a whole year!!!

It really feels like a figurative new day today: the high is 60. I am planning on going for a run (though let it be known that I have been running in the cold for 2 weeks now). I have the motivation to go to the Farmer's Market at Prospect Park. I actually would rather go do things with my morning rather than sit around reading news online in my pajamas until 1 pm, followed by sitting around watching quality programming (see last post) until I finally decide I should shower and talk to people. There is fast paced music on in my apartment (Paul Simon! Phil Collins for my brother! ha.) not the melancholy, I-hate-the-winter kind of reflective music I often default to and wallow in. Who cares that on Monday I had my first snow day in 5 years! It's daylight savings!!

So. Feel free to hope today. Now that the days are getting longer, you can feel justified in your incessant talk of the impending marvelous season. Feel justified in your hope for flip flops and parks. Hope for smiling when you step outside. Hope for sitting outside and enjoying a beverage. Hope for Uncle Louie G's next door to finally open again for the season and sell me a delicious $2 vanilla chip Italian Ice (or The K, or whoever your local ice cream provider may be.) I can't contain myself. I may have to add an addendum to this post later today after I let it all sink in that this day has actually arrived. Sigh.

not coherent.

i am today
a midsummer's night's dream.

i am immersed
in type
and stories
and verse

i am today
conjuring spring,
spain
longer days
light that remains

i am today
tapping the sky
for elysium.

Somehow.

I have turned in my 2nd quarter grade early. Somehow I have all my lesson plans ready through the day before our week-long break. Somehow my "in" tray for papers to grade is empty. Miraculous. So I am writing at 11:22 on a Wednesday.

This post is mostly to share other writers' words. I am wrapping up a poetry unit with my students and there is something about all of the possibility that lies in poetry and the beauty of revision and experimentation that makes me feel like it's not winter outside. Or, makes me embrace winter a little better?

The extra credit assignment for kids who want a challenge or are done with their collections early is to write an Ars Poetica, a term coined by Horace in 18 BC. Its hard to name the excitement that runs through me knowing that these conversations have been going on throughout the existence of the written word. The term officially means "the art of poetry" and has come to describe a poem that is about poetry (think metacognition, but for a genre of literature). Here is one that just breaks my heart in the best of ways:


Ars Poetica by Claribel Alegria,
trans. by D. Flakoll

poet by trade,
condemned so many times
to be a crow,
would never change places
with the Venus de Milo:
while she reigns in the Louvre
and dies of boredom
and collects dust
I discover the sun
each morning
and amid valleys
volcanoes
and debris of war
I catch sight of the promised land.

I love the idea of poetry being a means of hope and of capturing and renaming the world and its corners. I keep thinking that if we paid more attention to the corners overlooked and the hands untouched that we could give them life. And their life can bring life to those who live out a cheapened version.

swooned by snow. no words necessary.

too alive to stay.

The pipes are frozen.
No choice
but to sit
in my pajamas
and wait.

Somehow I feel more inspired by life right now than I have in a while. Well, inspired in a different way. All fall I just wanted to be outside and walking through leaves. Now the only place I want to be is inside as far away from the 2 degree weather. The one thing that winter is good for is justifying a day spent mostly on the couch.

In my internet reading and researching this morning, I came across a Brooklyn artist's prints, which had titles that could have been poetry--and of course they made me want to write poetry off of them...attempting to say in words what she said in colors and scenes and figures. I found one that seemed to say more to me and about me than what I could ever do in words, though.

It is called "Too Alive to Stay" and seems to encapsulate the feeling that is just rooted within me that there is so much to be doing and excited about right now. I want to reign in this feeling and hope that that i don't ever stay in a place--in all its literal and figurative connotations--because it feels safe or comfortable. The current aliveness includes: attempting to become fluent in Spanish, writing in general and with my students and figuring out to teach it well, reading books, planning summer travel, listening to good music and drinking wine with friends.

So. Happy Winter. Perhaps there's some hope for these cold, cold months until spring.

Wonder.

I spend my days with thirteen year olds. Most people make very strange faces at me when I tell them this, followed by some sort of apology. This post is dedicated to all you cynics out there. 8th graders rock and here's why:

Yesterday my student teacher was running the class. His back was toward all of the windows. All of my students and I were facing him--and all the windows, obviously. All of a sudden, the little, teeny snowflakes that had been falling all morning turned into these enormous near-hyperbole snowflakes falling from the sky. I noticed my students drifting away and staring and then I, too, got distracted. I had to ask my student teacher to stop so that we could have a two minute celebration: literally all my students rushed to the windows and I couldn't have wiped the smiles from their faces if I had tried.

This. Is why I love my job.
This. Is proof that 8th graders don't always want to be jaded.
This. Is what helps me appreciate the winter.

"Hey guys, it's snowing."

espresso machine
laptops open
a saturday evening mix
of social and scholarly.
words and a cold wind grin
gush
childlike
through the door

huh.

sometimes.
but not often.
winter air is
cathartic
purposeful
strengthening
perfect.

i'm just as surprised as you are.

On Certain Sundays in November.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that winter seemed to unofficially start this week (and forced me to bust out my ankle length down coat, hat and mittens) or the fact that a few weeks of it getting dark at 4:30 is all it takes for me to start dreaming about space, light, warm weather and travel, standing in the 80 degree weather overlooking the river in Austin last weekend or if it was seeing images like this on design*sponge:












But whatever it is, I'm feeling a little antsy and wishing for some sun, some evening light and a deck to sit on (or a mountain to climb or a lake to swim in...)

So Beautiful It Hurts.

The irony in the poem I am about to type out for you by Gwendolyn Brooks is that it encapsulates the beauty of...snow. Yes, it is April. Yes, my insides have been screaming for the long days and flip flops and hyacinths of spring. But somehow on a day of 30 degress in April, a poem about snow brings out the phrase 'it hurts my heart." I have been criticized in the past for using these words together--people claiming that the verb needs to change; that hurt is all wrong for beauty. But I cannot. I wrote on Thursday about the longing feeling that grabs my heart...and a beautiful ache is the only way to describe it. Something that reaches so deeply into who I am or things I love that it literally does hurt.

And I love when I come across people who get that. Who have felt it, too, and don't think I'm crazy. And today, a day that I want to shove my winter coat in the garbage can, i a poet writing winter got it. I suppose it is beautiful sometimes, afterall.

Cynthia in the Snow

It SHUSHES.
It hushes
The loudness in the road.
It flitter-twitters,
And laughs away from me.
It laughs a lovely
whiteness,
And whitely whirs away,
To be
Some otherwhere,
Still white as milk or shirts.
So beautiful it hurts.

Everyone Needs Some Patty Griffin

It is amazing when one line can completely sum up my life:

"I need a little place in the sun sometimes or I think I will die!"

I suppose it's half in jest, but really, winter, it's time to end.

A Little Will For You

Tomorrow’s high temperature is 18. 18! If you know me, you know that I have issues with the winter. But more than the winter pulling me down, I think the haunting of spring might be worse. There’s a flower store on my walk to and from work in Brooklyn that puts potted hyacinths out in February. February! Apparently they don’t know that such an essential smell of spring messes with my Seasonal Affective Disordered mind. It is impossible for that scent not to travel directly inside of me and make me truly believe, for a moment, that the beloved season that ends winter has come. But then I look at my ankle length, down coat and the wool mittens threaded through its arm holes. Blast.

The spring is in front of me, but I continually refuse to believe that it will actually come. I have no patience, especially in March. One of my best friends from high school and I used to go hiking every March 1st wearing shorts, declaring to our friends that spring had finally come. We searched for tiny flowers as proof and clung to them until real spring appeared sometime in mid April. Upon return from a week long camping trip in Florida to cold Oxford, Ohio, my friend and I cooked dinner on a camping stove and hung bags of oranges from our porch. It was as if I refused to trust the promise that spring would actually make its way into my life.

I recently revisited Macbeth and saw the same thing. The witches are the trickiest characters in the play to understand. They haunt Macbeth and Banquo with visions of the future and each time I read it I picture their tone differently. Sometimes I see them as strange and prophetic, sometimes haunting and crazy, mysterious or funny. Regardless how their message comes across, though, they paint a picture of future glory in front of these men. They are able to disregard the witches’ craziness for the beauty of the promise they speak: that Macbeth would be king and that Banquo would father kings.
Macbeth is completely unwilling to wait around for that day, though. Instead of letting his future wind its course, he jumpstarts it all by planning ways for it to happen by his power as soon as possible. Macbeth refused to trust in the promise. He has Banquo, among others, killed to ensure his way to the throne.

Banquo’s ghost appears at Macbeth’s dinner party, and only Macbeth can see him. We have two options here: Macbeth is either hallucinating because of all he has done or Banquo’s ghost really is there and is trying to warn Macbeth about what he is doing. I guess this is the beauty of drama—it really is up to interpretation (translation: read or see the play and tell me what you think. Seriously.) Regardless, his inability to trust in the promise is haunting him and causes even more distress.
The question of this play rings in my mind—did the witches know this would happen? Could it have happened another way? Are they the reason it happened at all? The only insight into that question I have is that the play is called the Tragedy of Macbeth. There is a lot of blood spilled and minds lost. So what’s the moral of the story? Is there ever just one?

What I see today is wanting myself to trust wholeheartedly in what I am promised in the future—heaven—and not the hallmark heaven that people talk about in bad poetry, but the heaven that is the home that my heart hears calling. I need to trust that the longing that my heart feels on so many levels will be fulfilled. One day. I’m promised the kingdom of heaven, but not given many more details about what will happen in between. But lucky for me, God isn’t a (pick one: sadistic, scary, prophetic) witch whose mood we can’t read for the life of us.

I just hope that I can begin to trust in the promise rather than taking it all into my own hands, thinking that my ideas might get me there faster.

And maybe just for now, I just need to begin to trust that winter will end and I will get to hang up my sweet coat.