These could be chores: washing dishes, folding laundry, scrubbing a toilet, cooking enough food to feed two people through the next few days of long shifts. This could all be a drag, something I do because I have to, but rebel against with each breath.
You know what you get from resisting the present? A bad mood, and the shoulder knots to go with it.
Who wants that?
The facts are these:
1) I enjoy a neat (okay, reasonably neat) house, clean clothes, and good food.
2) I have neither maid nor personal chef in my employ.
3) I fancy that I am cultivating a personal outlook modeled roughly on the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, Anusara yoga, and Pollyanna two or three drinks in.
4) Internal bitching and moaning about doing chores that need doing and generally produce results that cause me only happiness does not mesh with any of the preceding facts.
And so, I put forward this: there are ways to find wonderment–or at the very least sufficient contentment–in everything one does, even those things that involve cleaning products or eye-burning onions.
When a simple attitude adjustment proves elusive, may I suggest adding a heaping scoop of good music, a dash of no-one-is-looking silliness, and a sip of a favorite beverage? This recipe has rarely failed me.
And so it is that, on my last day off, when I might otherwise be unfurling a longer and longer litany of mental I don’t want to go to work tomorrow why didn’t I get more done this weekend I wish I were doing something else before my last hours of freedom trickle away Oh woe is me! I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, snapping beans, drinking wine, and singing along with Judy Collins on etown in a key I shouldn’t. The dogs don’t really know what to make of it all, but they sidle a little closer with each new song, not especially moved by the music, but hoping for a bean of their own.
I don’t know when the change happened, but I suddenly notice that this no longer feels like work.
How ’bout that?
Something else: The first time I heard Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, I was already behind the times. I didn’t have consistent internet access, didn’t have TV, and listened to public radio. It was the night shift in the ER, and I’d ducked into the staff lounge to bolt down my dinner before racing back out into the fray. Someone had left the teevee on, on a channel that couldn’t have been MTV, since it was playing actual music videos. Something unmemorable finished while I pulled the lid off my tupperware, and the Rorschach test of Gnarls’ video filled the screen.
Maybe it’s just a graveyard shift phenomenon, but the last time I was stopped in my tracks like that was almost fifteen years ago, when WNCW played this jaw-dropper, and made me late for my 4AM rounds:
Tonight I heard the Gnarls song for a second first time, unveiled and shown in a new light, as all good covers ought to do. On that same etown episode, Shawn Colvin sang those same lyrics in a down tempo, more tender and naked than the original. It was the right frame for the picture, the best choice from the spice rack to bring out that flavor you’d not otherwise notice.
It’s all a matter of perspective, you know. A song can sound different, perfect, without changing a single note or word. Likewise, a chore can become a pleasure, though it is still the same task. You just have to sing it differently.
Solid hand of white
cloud clasps the bare
ridge, a finger
in each cove.
A storm, ready to
heave itself over far mountains,
breathes cold
ahead of its coming.
My warm cheeks
brush stray snowflakes,
quickly turn them
into rain.
Fog blooms
in one lone headlight.
My glasses mimic,
blanching over
the road’s clear lines.
Water in all its forms
inhabits the morning,
its sheen and weight
gloss the ground,
fatten the air.
Drink deep.
In the hour or two after
full light and before
that storm
belly-crawls over
the county line, a
lemon-drop sun will
blot dry the pavement,
wring out the grass,
warm my lenses clear.
Inside this sunrise
the moist lips of the earth
touch each other
kiss me all over
speak to
the fast-approaching day.
Good morning is
a thing all
creatures know how to say.
We on our two legs
with bare faces
and grasping hands
add another:
For this light
this day
my wet skin, thank you.
Some good stuff to be gleaned from this nice little piece over at elephant:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […]We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” (The White Album, Joan Didion)
In this statement (and in much of her other writing) Didion highlights a fact about writing that often goes overlooked: everything we write, whether it be an anecdotal account of a personal experience or a report on the developments in the stock market, is a product of our own individual subjectivity, and is no more than our own interpretations of the facts we have collected or observed. We act as filters, not mirrors, of the truth.
Then there’s this, given to me on a little scrap of paper by a friend, which made the 1500-mile journey from the front of my last refrigerator to the door of the current one. I don’t know if the emphasis is Kerouac’s or my friend’s, and it really doesn’t matter.
I read it while drinking straight from the carton:
BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Words from people made famous by their own words are supposed to carry more weight, right? Well, he said it, not me: You’re a Genius all the time. Believe it.
None of this made sense:
her teeth
the way she wiped
her hands on the dirty
dish towel then
smoothed it perfect
where it hung on
the long bar.
But wait.
That,
that I’d seen before.
Dismissive flick of the wrist,
reflexive tidying after–
she’d brushed me
aside much the same way
then eased the wrinkle
where I’d lain, erasing
with cool fingers
my last trace.
Saying the only words
I’d ever wanted
to hear from
her mouth,
each syllable al dente,
snapping off under
white incisors.
You know, I
wanted to tell her,
I always thought one day
you might bite me
with those teeth
the same way you bit
through words when
you were angry.
Sharp and final, keeping
the best parts in your mouth
sharing nothing
of their meaning but
giving freely of the bitterness
running down your chin.
I could
catch those
drops or
I could have
nothing.
Let me wipe your mouth.
I will do the dishes,
match the lids for the tupperware
keep what is left for tomorrow.
You will tuck a napkin under your chin.
I will be gone before your last bite.
I’ve been working with my hands a lot lately, which has precluded much of the blogging. If I had a personal secretary, maybe that could be different–I’d dictate between cursing myself over needle pricks, and my secretary would smartly tap my brilliant thoughts into an ergonomic keyboard. We’d be models of productivity, sipping tea and posting daily. It would be the only way to blog.
As you’ve probably noticed, that isn’t quite how it’s played out.
I’ve had plenty of time to think about writing, plenty of time to compose any number of pieces in my head, to scribble notes on a handy legal pad before I thread that needle again and start on another quilt square. But after sitting for hours at that work, the last thing I want to do when I set the sewing aside is pull up the keyboard.
It’s nothing personal, dear reader. I’m just not very good at sitting on my ass for extended periods of time, even if the work is rewarding.
Your grandmother was wrong: idle hands aren’t the problem. Overly busy hands can cause much more trouble, especially when coupled with an active brain.
So much sitting, so much thinking… It may produce one day a wealth of works-in-progress, more germinating idea-seeds than I could ever possibly tend. The next, the yield might be hours of false starts, or nothing at all. Blank pages, dry ground. And all this is okay; this is how it goes. Where the breakdown occurs is in that leap from head or page to blog–with the hands occupied, the notes pile up, the ideas collide and bottleneck, and when I find a few moments at the computer, I can’t untangle just one from the mess. And so this site lies fallow, the knotty idea-mass starts to writhe and hiss (or sometimes rot and stink), and my personal frustration-monster gets fat and sassy.
It becomes necessary to reboot.
I don’t see how anyone can be happy if they don’t get outside and if they don’t move their bodies. To untangle the mess inside my head, I have to be on dirt and under an open sky, or on my yoga mat. In both cases, it’s a realignment that happens, a correcting of posture (in all its meanings) through purposeful movement and intent. The body and the mind aren’t separate. You can’t soothe one without calming the other. (The inverse is just as true–as my knotted shoulders and snarling inner monologue will attest after long days at a desk.) It seems patently obvious, but it’s also been a lesson long in the learning. I’d thought that something like quilting should be quite the relaxing endeavor–and it is, in some ways–but the restless brain factor kinda mucks all that up.
You may have read that worry is a misuse of imagination. I’ve seen this quotation/idea variously attributed, and I can’t say for sure who said it first. Its truth is evident to anyone who has ever examined their own worry and realized how much of it is unnecessary. I’d put my fidgety brain-tangle in a similar category: it’s misuse of one’s creative juices, to set them going but deny them outlet. It’s about putting things to their proper use, in their proper form, at the proper time. The “right” way to do things is the way that best serves that thing’s form and function. My brain isn’t best served by turning turning turning like a hamster wheel, with nowhere to go; my writer’s tendencies aren’t best served by composing only in my head.
It’s always, ever, a quest for balance. As I find mine (and lose it, and find it, and lose it…), I’ll be straightening more out of the tangle, some of which should end up here. Thanks for your patience.
…which is not to say this is not a perfect day to sit down for some more work on a project that doubles as a cozy blanket, a dog or two at my side and a cup of tea close by:
I’m of two minds on the rainy day. While I was living in the land of 360 days of sunshine a year, the rare rainy day was prime time for doing lots of nothing. Reading a book. Going to see a movie. Sleeping in. Drinking hot tea and not changing out of my pajamas. A rainy day was a day to hunker down and recharge–usually sorely needed, if you’ve gathered anything about my personality. A slower pace, even if foisted upon me by a simply trick of weather.
But now that I find myself back in wetter climes, the rainy day comes far too often to be a day of sloth. Maybe it’s the fact of being back among falling leaves and rhododendron and fog, or maybe it’s simply that rain here falls more softly than in the desert, but something in that rain calls for being out in it.
Or perhaps what we have here is another trick of semantics: recharge doesn’t have to be a passive process. Calgon commercials might have single-handedly brought the idea of the spa into the mainstream, and, since then, rejuvenate, relax, and restore have all taken on meanings that expressly involve pink fuzzy slippers, scented candles, and gendered literature.
Coupla thoughts here: In successfully commodifying stress itself, the marketeers have managed to make it yet another “problem” to be solved (or temporarily ameliorated) with purchased goods. This bothers me for lots of reasons–not least of which because it takes the actual person out of the equation–but is tangential to the discussion at hand. What is relevant is this: when I talk about recharging, “slower pace” might just be a misnomer. Call it simpler pace, maybe. Sitting on the couch with a book and hiking through quiet, dripping woods can accomplish the same thing, not because of what qualities the activities themselves share, but because of what in both cases isn’t there.
On the couch or outside, I am setting aside other concerns. Giving my focus to one thing. And, as with my fledgling meditation practice, it’s that focus that is key. Focus implies clarity, as in focusing a camera, but also intensity and power and a consolidation or unity of one’s energies.
You see how this doesn’t have to happen in your slippers, yes? Even better, it’s not something that can only happen on rainy days. Calgon is nice and all, but you don’t have to get in your tub to step outside your cares (though I’m certainly not knocking a good, hot bath).
Sing it Different
These could be chores: washing dishes, folding laundry, scrubbing a toilet, cooking enough food to feed two people through the next few days of long shifts. This could all be a drag, something I do because I have to, but rebel against with each breath.
You know what you get from resisting the present? A bad mood, and the shoulder knots to go with it.
Who wants that?
The facts are these:
1) I enjoy a neat (okay, reasonably neat) house, clean clothes, and good food.
2) I have neither maid nor personal chef in my employ.
3) I fancy that I am cultivating a personal outlook modeled roughly on the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, Anusara yoga, and Pollyanna two or three drinks in.
4) Internal bitching and moaning about doing chores that need doing and generally produce results that cause me only happiness does not mesh with any of the preceding facts.
And so, I put forward this: there are ways to find wonderment–or at the very least sufficient contentment–in everything one does, even those things that involve cleaning products or eye-burning onions.
When a simple attitude adjustment proves elusive, may I suggest adding a heaping scoop of good music, a dash of no-one-is-looking silliness, and a sip of a favorite beverage? This recipe has rarely failed me.
And so it is that, on my last day off, when I might otherwise be unfurling a longer and longer litany of mental I don’t want to go to work tomorrow why didn’t I get more done this weekend I wish I were doing something else before my last hours of freedom trickle away Oh woe is me! I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, snapping beans, drinking wine, and singing along with Judy Collins on etown in a key I shouldn’t. The dogs don’t really know what to make of it all, but they sidle a little closer with each new song, not especially moved by the music, but hoping for a bean of their own.
I don’t know when the change happened, but I suddenly notice that this no longer feels like work.
How ’bout that?
Something else: The first time I heard Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, I was already behind the times. I didn’t have consistent internet access, didn’t have TV, and listened to public radio. It was the night shift in the ER, and I’d ducked into the staff lounge to bolt down my dinner before racing back out into the fray. Someone had left the teevee on, on a channel that couldn’t have been MTV, since it was playing actual music videos. Something unmemorable finished while I pulled the lid off my tupperware, and the Rorschach test of Gnarls’ video filled the screen.
Maybe it’s just a graveyard shift phenomenon, but the last time I was stopped in my tracks like that was almost fifteen years ago, when WNCW played this jaw-dropper, and made me late for my 4AM rounds:
Tonight I heard the Gnarls song for a second first time, unveiled and shown in a new light, as all good covers ought to do. On that same etown episode, Shawn Colvin sang those same lyrics in a down tempo, more tender and naked than the original. It was the right frame for the picture, the best choice from the spice rack to bring out that flavor you’d not otherwise notice.
It’s all a matter of perspective, you know. A song can sound different, perfect, without changing a single note or word. Likewise, a chore can become a pleasure, though it is still the same task. You just have to sing it differently.
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Posted in Commentary + Philosophy
Tagged darrell scott, gnarls barkley, judy collins, living in the moment, perspective, philosphy, shawn colvin