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| View Out the Back Window of the Orono Public Library |
Saturday night, back home, I shared a section of my morning pages with my husband Scott. He suggested that I post it here. He wondered how others might respond to my words, which seemed to him more alive than my usual "crafted" writing.
So tonight, with the results of the Iowa caucuses unknown and the President yet to be acquitted, I'm sitting here determined to share that morning pages section. If I had to call it anything, I'd quote Coleridge and call it "Water, Water, Everywhere." Prepare ye to be jerked from sea to shining river--the mind can do that. I will break it into paragraphs and occasionally clarify parts that need it. Here goes.
"And as I write the date on this page [February 1, 2020], I realize that in addition to crossing a river [which I'll do later this morning], I'm also crossing into a new month, and I'm thinking back to the beginning of January that was so fully consumed by my parents' health issues that I didn't even put up my 2020 calendar until January 6 (or even the 7th): there was just no time even to think about it.
"Epiphany. The epiphany was that it was a new year, a new beginning, and I didn't even have the time to appreciate that I was, theoretically, crossing a new threshold; was, theoretically, standing at the edge of a fresh start; was, theoretically, poised at a kind of new beginning. The epiphany was that I could let a new beginning slip by. Wait: it was that I don't think that I trust new beginnings anymore.
"I used to really believe in, put a lot of stock in, new beginnings; I used to think that I could capitalize on those borders, thresholds, vantage points that I imbued with symbolism and motivational potential. But if it's one thing I've learned this past year, it's how so many of the symbols I've embraced, in part because I hoped the mindfulness and consciousness of them would inspire me and mark my being more free, were nothing but sandbags against the tide.
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Housatonic River flood; Ashley Falls, MA* |
"Because more than anything, it's not about avoiding the water. It's about keeping one's feet and clothing dry, about carrying one's valuables safely across it, about navigating it respectfully, even appreciatively, without drowning in it. . . .
"But there's so much water these days . . . there needs to be an effort to fight back. If I do nothing, I get swallowed up and I drown, but if I try too hard to fight it, I expend all this energy, get exhausted, and drown anyway. No, there has to be some analogy to how you swim when you get carried away by a rip current. You can't swim directly toward the shore; the wisdom is that you swim parallel to the shore, not at it. But what happens then? I'm not sure. . . . But what I do know is . . . that strategy is needed. Endurance is needed. It needs to be a smart effort, because as Lipsha Morrissey says in Love Medicine, "we live on dry land."
So there you have my morning pages passage. No more symbols, no more feel-good but ultimately hollow assignments of meaning to phenomena that parse time and space. Just an acknowledgment of so much water and some wise swimming and waded needed. Just a hope . . .. There are such things as houseboats; there are ways to live on water. And yes, I see that with those houseboats, I'm back to manufacturing metaphors and symbols that just might float my boat.
* https://www.flickr.com/photos/allisonac/2329645640/
** Yes, I know I'm mixing all kinds of water imagery; that happens in morning pages. I probably should have said beach, not flood plain.
