what I’ve learned from reading biographies

In the last 2 years, I’ve read 55 biographies and 103 memoirs. When I started, it was because individual books caught my attention. Gradually, I decided I might want to write something memoir-ish about my life, so it made sense to see what other people had written about.

Over the last several months, I’ve been trying to figure out the Myers-Briggs personality type of the subjects of (some of) these books, in an effort to find someone ‘like me’ in a meaningful sense, even if our lives were very different. For this effort, I’ve mostly concentrated on ‘typing’ writers since I’m now one.

Roald Dahl, E.B. White, P.L. Travers and J.K. Rowling (and possibly John Lithgow) all seemed to me to be INFJs; Beatrix Potter, ISFJ; Georgette Heyer and Harper Lee, INTJs. Socialite Millicent Rogers, ESFP.

It wasn’t until last night, when I was reading a biography of polymath-musician-y Brian Eno that I realized why I’ve felt vaguely unsettled reading so many of the biographies of writers. (Besides that they all seem to be Judgers, and I’m a Perceiver.) So many of the writers knew very early on in their lives that they wanted to be writers, and they rarely did anything else. They often wrote different kinds of things – short stories, novels, essays – and they may have had a nonwriting job or two that paid the bills, but they all had a singular vision for their lives. And then they lived it. (Beatrix Potter was the exception, as she was an artist first, before writing; then became a farmer).

That’s not me at all.

I did start writing as a teenager, but I certainly haven’t been writing continuously since then. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to come up with anything I’ve been doing continuously for any length of time.

I like to jump around between projects. I do have several subjects of interest that I return to irregularly, but the cycles arise organically, and entangle with whatever else is going on in my life. Trying to force it doesn’t work, which I found out the hard way, when I couldn’t write poetry for 20 years. I couldn’t find a way in, until I woke up one day and there was a poem inside me that wanted to come out. So I wrote it. (I’m still working on revising it.)

Sometimes I’m painting or drawing. Or designing garments. Or playing with yarn. Or thinking about philosophy. Or taking photographs. Or developing relationships with my (mostly-nonhuman) neighbors. Or reading whatever my current interest is. Or walking around. Or considering flavor profiles to create.

About the only thing I can think of that I wanted to do as a kid and I’m doing now is being an artist (well, a philosopher too), but I never thought of either of those activities as relating to a job. They are things I like to do. But they probably aren’t things I would identify myself as, if someone asked ‘what do you do?’ I don’t expect I’ll get famous doing them, make a lot of money, or have fans.

I never do know what to say these days when someone asks what I do. Because I do so many things, but they’re probably asking about employment, which I don’t have any of. Telling people I have a blog tends to shut down the conversation almost immediately.

Spouse remarked the other night that I seem to have a facility for reinventing myself. But I kind of have to, because I don’t stick with things long enough to ‘master’ them in a conventional sense. And I really can’t just concentrate on doing one thing at a time. My brain shuts down with boredom. If I’m not learning about a bunch of different things that can cross-fertilize each other, I get really depressed and start feeling like a total failure.

I think everyone I know keeps thinking that I need to find ‘the one thing’ that’s right for me, and then I’ll finally ‘settle down’ and you know, act like an ordinary adult. But I can’t see how that could even happen (short of a brain injury).

For me, there isn’t ever going to be ‘one thing’ that defines me. I’m not unitary about anything in my life – why would this be any different?

technique: staining fabric with fruit peels

I started thinking about how I could stain natural (off-white) fabrics of cotton, linen-cotton, and linen with materials I had on hand.

• I only wanted to use plant materials that were already separated from the plant. (I wasn’t going to go out and pick leaves, bark, mosses, etc.)
• I didn’t want dyes or anything necessarily permanent, so no fooling with mordants.
• And I didn’t want anything that might be toxic when poured down the drain.

We happened to have on hand a bunch of different kinds of fruit, and I wondered if steeping their skins in hot water could yield colorful results.

I need more experimenting, but one fruit was the clear winner!

1. Blueberries – 10 skins of various sizes, plus one small berry. Steeped in hot water for 47 minutes. Then I added FabricA-side1, for 70 minutes; FabricB-side3 for an unknown time interval.
2. Tangerine A –  peel of 1 medium fruit, light orange in color. Steeped for 38 minutes before I added FabricA-side2.
3. Tangerine B – peel of 1 small fruit, dark orange in color. Steeped for ~1 hour. Since water was still mostly clear, then added 1 bag of cherries and cinnamon tea, which steeped for 4 minutes, before I added FabricB-side4.
4. Apple – most of the peel of 1 small Fuji apple. Steeped for ~ 1 hour, but water never changed color, so I didn’t use it.
5. Mango – half of the peel of 1 fruit. Steeped for ~ 1 hour, but water never changed color, so I didn’t use it.
6. Blue corn tortilla chips. Water never changed color, so I didn’t use it.

The blueberry was by far the best. Even though I only used 10 berries, I was able to get color on three different fabric swatches: FabricA-side1, FabricB-sides3 and 4.

I took FabricA outside to lie flat and dry. Then I added 3 metal items, which I sprayed with water, and moved around to leave marks. The round donut-thing was rusted; the screw and bolt were blackened with age. Marks of rust and dark brown are visible.

 

 

The cherry-cinnamon-tea + tangerine peel water on FabricB-side4 did yield 2 soft pink splotches, but I wondered how they would look combined with the blueberry, so I later added that end into the blueberry jar to steep, for 1 hr 17 minutes.

 

I tend to start out thinking I’ll be rigorous and methodical, so it would be easy for someone to follow what I did, but I just can’t sustain ‘rigorous and methodical’ for longer than a few minutes. I like to jump in, and make something happen. I’ll often take notes, and I did this time, but I don’t worry if the time periods aren’t consistent, or totally comparable. I’m not a scientist in a lab, taking care that everything I do can be replicated. What I’m most interested in is catalyzing a change, which gives me a jumping off point for further experiments.

word tricks

I haven’t written much on my blog lately because I’ve mostly been off line puzzling my way through issues I can’t name. Wait, that sounds like I have secrets but that’s not the problem. My problem is words.  But beyond that, I have deeper problems. Say you set off by boat in a journey where, more or less, you knew where you were going. But there were storms that blew you off course. There were unfamiliar currents that took your boat and you to places you didn’t know existed. You met friends along the way who broadened your horizons. And then, say, your boat landed on a place you didn’t know how to describe, because none of the words you already knew seemed to fit this new reality. You want to do it justice on its own terms, not shoehorn its wonders into words and concepts designed for other contexts. But then how do you start talking about it, so that anyone else might understand you? That’s where I’m at right now.

And, along the way, I’ve realized that there are certain words and concepts that have always resonated for me that I don’t think actually mean what other people use them to mean.

For instance, ‘wild magic’, as written about in science-fiction and fantasy [such as Diana Wynne Jones’s A Sudden Wild Magic]. Okay I’m a Pagan, so ‘magic’ has a religious meaning, sort of, with the caveat that I am not Wiccan. But even the way that I understand Wiccans to use the word ‘magic’ seems to require that the user is seeking control over some forces; that the user is directing forces to do specific things, based on what the user wants to have happen. ‘Wild magic’, in the instances that I have read about, doesn’t work that way. The person who possesses it, for lack of a better term, can’t control it, can’t call it up whenever they like. They don’t know what it is, they don’t know how to use it; it just shows up sometimes. And the more they try to apply rules to it, the worse everything gets.

I don’t think that phenomenon is any sort of ‘magic’. I think it got named ‘wild magic’ in the same kind of way that certain North American grasses (genus Zizania) were named ‘wild rice’ even though they are not closely related to Asian rice grasses (genus Oryza). Naming the new grasses as a variety of rice inserts them into a familiar context, and suddenly they seem more understandable.

Since both Zizania and Oryza are distant cousins, though, because they are both members of the Oryzeae tribe in the family of grasses, Poaceae, maybe I need a better example. How about ‘red pandas’? They have previously been classified taxonomically with raccoons (family Procyonidae) and with bears (family Ursidae), but they are now in their own family, Ailuridae. Despite the common name ‘red panda’, these animals are only related to giant pandas at the taxonomic level of infraorder, which also includes all other bears, pinnipeds (walruses, seals, sea lions), and mustelids (weasels, badgers, otters, wolverines).

That was more of a detour than I meant to take (although I really love taxonomy!). My larger point was, the first people who encountered the animal now called ‘red panda’ used that name to place the animal in a larger context, such as they understood it. But they were wrong. Ailurus fulgans, per our current understanding, might just as well have been called ‘red wolverine’ or ‘red eared seal (terrestrial)’. And yet all of those names would still be wrong. The animal is its own kind. It needs its own name.

I think ‘wild magic’ is like that. It’s not ‘magic’ at all, because ‘magic’ in this context depends upon the will and control of the user.

Another related problem that I began running into years ago is how to characterize the kind of relationship I want to have with non-humans, and Nature generally. Even in conservation and other environmentally-friendly/so-called ‘green’ contexts, the word most commonly used is ‘stewardship’.

My dictionary’s primary definition of ‘steward’ is: a person who manages another’s property or financial affairs; one who administers anything as the agent of another or others.

I don’t see nonhumans or Nature as property of anybody.  Nor do I want to manage them. And I certainly would not want to manage them, for a third party. So that’s three levels of Wrongness.

Even to object in English to how these concepts treat nonhumans or Nature, all I can say is that they are ‘dehumanized’, which doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t at all what I wanted to convey. I guess I could say, the previous ‘objectifies’ them, but again, I think that term is only used for people (in the human-people sense).

I’ve been calling nonhumans ‘people’ for years now, but because the default use of the term only refers to human beings, I have to be quite explicit before it makes any difference to most other people. And then they just think I’m flaky or weird or stupid. (Especially not helpful when it happens in a professional context.)

So I’ve been using ‘neighbors’ to denote both human and nonhuman neighbors because that sidesteps personhood in a legal sense, and gets right to the heart of the real issue to me, which is that these are beings that I have interdependent relationships with.

This is not at all a reference to my religious or spiritual beliefs either. Those are in another one of their periodic flux states, so that at this moment, I’m not sure I believe anything.

Oddly enough, thinking about religious or spiritual ideas is part of the way I sidled into realizing that words and concepts themselves were a large part of my problems lately. I was thinking about how the Christians and other theists I know interact with their gods: they ask for help, for guidance, they want to know what they should do. Or they want a problem fixed. They are appealing to an authority figure to control things.

My gods don’t tell me anything. They don’t direct my actions, and I don’t ask them to do that. I suddenly wondered, maybe my gods aren’t ‘gods’ at all. I’m not sure I know what they are, beyond embodied energies (that I often can’t picture, but when I can, are rarely even humanoid) that I am in relationship to. Basically, I think we are friends. Of a sort. I don’t really understand them, and I don’t think they really understand me, but somehow we enjoy each other’s company, and we both feel enriched by our connection. Sometimes I notice that I haven’t heard from them in a while. They have lives and interests separate from mine, as I do from them.

But I don’t ‘pray’ to them, I don’t ask them for favors. If there even is anything they could ‘do for me’, I don’t know what it is.

I don’t think anybody is ‘in charge of’ the Universe, or Earth, or human beings. I don’t think there is one authority (or a panel of authorities) who are ‘running’ things. The more I learn about nonlinear dynamics, complexity, fractals, nested systems, etc., the more it seems to me that nothing can be known; nothing can be controlled. Statistical probabilities are the closest you can get to either, but all that tells you is general patterns in aggregate. If what you want to know is, what one individual human being (or one liver cell, or one atom of potassium, or one dwarf star) will do, especially if you have a specific time frame in mind, well, I don’t think anybody can know that, before it happens. Even the gods.

Me, personally? I think that’s fabulous in an awesome-and-terrifying-but-beautiful kind of way. The older I get, the less I’m interested in ‘knowing’ anything at all. Once you think you ‘know’, you start taking it for granted. It’s harder for anything to surprise you (in a good way), because you’re not really paying attention to anything but your own interests. And so, when things surprise you, you’re more likely to think it’s ‘in a bad way’ because it’s interfering with your own plans.

I don’t plan anymore. I prepare, emotionally and physically, for what I think could happen. I act, moment to moment, in the context as I perceive it. I remain aware that the context is much more complicated than I know, or can know. Before, I might have described my trail of actions as looking like a meandering river, but that’s still linear-ish, and mostly 2-dimensional. I think it would look more like the flight path of a butterfly.

Scientists used to think that butterflies ‘fluttered aimlessly’ until experiments where researchers outfitted butterflies with harmonic transponders. It turns out that butterflies fly loops to search out good foraging sites.  Their flight paths look cockeyed and erratic to our eyes, but their behavior is sensible and effective in context. I have to trust my own feeling of rightness, even when what I’m doing makes little sense to others, and so far, I don’t have a clear way to talk about it.

winter: abide with me

Since we moved to Maryland in 2008, every winter I struggle with honoring the season. Winter is about death, about letting go, about lying fallow. But every year around this time, I feel overwhelmed with loss and grief and giving up on cherished hopes. Every year, I yearn for spring: new growth, new beginnings, new hopes. And yet, the time is not right for any of that.

In fact, before any of that can happen, first I need to embody winter. Ereshkigal is my patron; you’d think I’d be used to her purview by now.

In preparation for Samhain 2011, I developed a list of personal connections and relationships that were already moribund, and that I needed to release, so they could die all the way. It was surprisingly long. At that time, though, caught up in the holy season, my feelings about the demise of those relationships were muted, resigned. But now here, in January, I feel grief.

Around Samhain, circumstances arose that gave me new hope about three of these (doomed) relationships. Just a few days ago I realized those hopes were not realized. So instead of calmly saying goodbye to something long dead, I have to work through hopes being raised, then dashed, again.

There are so many relationships where what I imagined, and what I hoped for based mostly on those imaginings, were much more colorful, and lively, nourishing and joyful, than any relationships I ever had a chance of having with these people in the real world. Every winter I am reminded of that. And it’s hard.

I am an optimist, but I’m also pragmatic. I will work away on my hopes for these cherished (ideas of) relationships, for years and years. And then, what feels like suddenly (but really has been a slow accumulation), I will come to perceive that those hopes are misplaced. That energy could be, needs to be, put to better use.

And at that point, for me the relationship ends irrevocably. Before then, if the other person had made any sort of heartfelt overture, I would have accepted it joyously, and moved forward into a new future with them. Instead, we were here, at the dock, but I have sailed away. Together we approached the chasm; alone, I crossed the bridge, then cut the ropes and let them fall.

It doesn’t get easier to do it, because each relationship speaks to different parts of me. I know what the process is, so I know I’ll survive it, one way or another. But I don’t know, I can’t know, who I will be once I’ve crossed over. Only that I won’t be the person who hoped for so long.

+++

As part of the same letting go of the past process, two days ago I threw away my high school yearbooks. I’m working on forgetting the names and what snippets of their personal histories I still recall of all of my classmates and ex-childhood friends in Illinois, and anywhere else.

Winter asks me to be here now. To look critically over my current life, and decide: What activities and thoughts have become parasites? What energies can be redirected? Where can space be cleared, for whatever comes next?

If I told someone I know now the name of my high school and what year I graduated, they would not know anything more about me except my age. And I’m not hiding that – I’m 45. Back in high school, I wanted to become a famous biologist, and discover a new organism that would be named after me. Or I wanted to become a famous artist. Or I wanted to be a translator at the United Nations. None of those things have come close to happening. But so what?

There wasn’t any subject that we studied in my Catholic college prep high school that I cared about passionately. There were no art classes whatsoever. As a senior, I was allowed to take one semester of humanities, which was essentially Western art history. So I wrote papers about motifs I found in Fra Angelico’s frescoes, but I never got to create my own paintings. We did a unit on poetry in English one year, but outside of that, I don’t remember any ‘creative writing’. Mr. Kane, my English teacher junior year(?) made us memorize all the monarchs of England, beginning with William the Conqueror. I never could figure out what that had to do with literature. I did enjoy 3-1/2 years of high school Spanish, but I would’ve enjoyed even more studying Spanish art and culture. It was in junior year Spanish that I wrote a paper on Islamic (Moorish) architecture in Spain, which sparked a lifelong interest in cultural mixing zones generally, and Islamic architecture specifically. I took senior year Physics (even though I wasn’t in advanced math) as an elective because I was interested in quantum physics, optics, and fluid dynamics — and then we didn’t cover any of those topics. All the same, I’ve read all sorts of books over the years on quantum physics, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics. Really, I’ll read about any branch of science, especially those that deal with biology and/or the environment. But also philosophy, which no one ever mentioned in high school.

I became a Pagan post-high school. And, in a lot of ways, that’s when my life really began.

There are plenty of people I knew before 1986 who will not in any way acknowledge that I am now a Pagan, and that this change is deeply meaningful to me; that my life since then cannot really be understood without that salient metamorphosis.

So far, I have not found it possible to sustain satisfying relationships with these people. Perhaps becoming a Pagan first allowed me to realize how much more I could be asking of my relationships than I had been previously. Maybe that change in worldview was the first time I crossed a bridge alone?

I am reminded of a passage I read in late November by Bernard Rollin, who wrote in Animal Rights and Human Morality, 3^rd edition:

…the moral gestalt shift that is a necessary prerequisite to any genuine and enduring change in conduct. No one can be argued into morality…. But argument can prepare the ground and plant the seeds that may grow into new moral viewpoints and show anomalies in one’s ordinary perspective that ready us for the possibility of a new, revolutionary shift in attitude. (p. 108; boldness mine).

I had not previously considered that my Paganism might have directly impacted the relationships that have foundered lately.

I did realize that my current Great Work has been taking me further and further away from my previous quotidian concerns. That friends who don’t share my environmental and philosophical concerns are people with whom I can think of fewer and fewer topics to discuss, happenings to share.

Just this morning I read Alice Walker’s words:

The writer — like the musician or painter — must be free to explore, otherwise she or he will never discover what is needed (by everyone) to be known. This means, very often, finding oneself considered ‘unacceptable’ by masses of people who think that the writer’s obligation is not to explore or to challenge, but to second the masses’ motions, whatever they are. Yet the gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account. (p. 264, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens)

+++

I’m leaving behind everything that once was familiar. Sometimes I want to hurry the process along. I want to quickly slip back into familiarity, being comfortable, knowing anything at all.

But Winter asks me to abide, and I’m trying.

poetry and poached eggs

displeased and displaced, our carbuncles cried ‘Uncle!’

the deranged ninja sought revenge on an angel

I fumbled my thimble and it tumbled down stairs

a tranquil beast found danger as it rambled through Stonehenge

she winched up the poncho the honcho was wearing

blintzes for brunch in the French mansion’s dungeon

Dracula’s cockatiel played glockenspiel

 

I’ve been writing down lists of words containing various pairs and triples of consonants, then trying to create whimsical, not-quite-nonsensical sentences with them. Perhaps they, or some version of them, will appear in a poem someday.

I can hardly believe it was Monday of this week that I felt so awful physically. Last night, after a gluten-free dinner, I left the restaurant with Spouse, and my brain zinged with clarity. I came home and read a couple of books* about how to eat gluten-free, and what order to eat foods in to optimize energy levels. I was reluctant to eat anything sugary, in case brain fog would return. The thing is, I now realize that I must’ve been ‘self-medicating’ with sugar and wheat for years. Those opioid spikes in brain energy really matter when you’re feeling depressed, anxious, and/or lethargic most of the time – as I was. But when your brain and body energy coasts more evenly, you don’t need spikes to tide you over. Also, I don’t seem to be getting as many random ‘daily headaches’ as I was, just a week ago.

I actually went for two walks around our neighborhood today: one alone, taking lots of photographs; and a later one with Spouse (where he took more photos than I did).

I cooked poached eggs for breakfast, the first time I’d had them in (iirc) almost 40 years. They were delicious.

I think this is going to work.

 

*The Kid-Friendly ADHD & Autism Cookbook by Pamela Compart and Dana Laake; and Gluten-Free Girl by Shauna James Ahern. Ms. Ahern’s blog has been added to my blogroll.

quelle surprise

I’ve been writing every day, and surprised at how easy it is to do that. But I’ve had to put on hold my new practice of going for a walk every day before breakfast. Monday I was too weak to get out of bed, and there was nothing in the house that I could eat anyway. Spouse went to the grocery store, bought food and brought it home, then fed it to me. Hours later, I thought I was strong enough to visit the grocery myself, to pick out things to try. But the store was crowded, I felt overwhelmed by everything. Spouse had to lead me by the hand while I looked down at the floor. We barely spoke, because I couldn’t spare the energy. When we got home, I had to go straight to bed. Spouse brought me more food, which I ate. Later in the evening, I recovered enough strength and brainpower to finish reading my last library book, and watch a movie.

Today my big accomplishment has been putting on clothes, and walking half a block each way to the recycling bin, twice, in the pouring rain. (I was bundled up very warmly.)

+++

I got what I thought was a stomach bug Thursday. I began to feel better Friday. Sunday started very pleasantly, and then suddenly I got violently ill.

The blueberry scones and raisin challah I had considered treats to add joy to my life were probably the culprits. It seems I have developed an intolerance for gluten.

Spouse went looking online for information about celiac disease. There are lots of symptoms, so it is often misdiagnosed as all sorts of other things. I knew that, because years ago I had a friend who developed it, and he finally figured out on his own what it was. I have a current friend with celiac disease who I e-mailed on Christmas day to ask for information.

I’m not in any physical shape to have the blood test, or the endoscopy, to confirm a diagnosis.

None of the symptoms I had were enough on their own to go see my doctor, but looking at the list, suddenly a whole lot of stuff plaguing me for the last year or so makes sense.

• Three months ago, I started getting red itchy spots on the skin around my abdomen front and back. I wouldn’t call it a rash, because there was only one spot or two at a time; once there was three, all in a row. I thought we had bed bugs. I’ve been sleeping on two towels for months now, trying to trick the bugs into going in search of Spouse instead. Somehow he never got bit.
• The joints of my big toes, my inner elbows, and occasionally my hands, started to hurt a lot. I’ve been told by doctors that I have hyper extensible joints, so I thought perhaps that meant that my joints were more sensitive to overuse. I’ve been trying to remember to straighten out my arms regularly, instead of keeping them bent (for sitting at the computer, or reading a book). I also worried I was getting arthritis, or maybe already had fibromyalgia.
• I felt myself getting progressively weaker, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything. I’ve always had a fairly sedentary life but in the last year or so, I’ve had to give up all sorts of activities that I still used to be able to do, but no longer had the energy for. It seemed like it was inertia, or maybe laziness. I never thought of fatigue.
• I’ve been getting panic attacks since I was a child, but now I also have anxiety attacks. But I have anxiety disorders, so that didn’t seem weird.
• I’ve gotten migraines since I was a teenager. Since we moved to Maryland, I started getting headaches whenever the sun has a certain intensity. Even from inside a building. Some days I wake up with one. But I have light eyes and light skin, and I’ve never tolerated high temperatures very well.
• I’ve been cycling in and out of episodes of depression all my life. Yes, lately, sometimes I felt like my health was failing in some indeterminate way, but I thought that was the depression talking.
• Pain in my abdomen that I thought was my kidneys, except that you’re not supposed to be able to feel your kidneys.
• Lots of occasional gastrointestinal issues, that were vaguely troubling, but did not have the warning signs I knew to look for. I figured that sometimes my diet was lacking something.  However the episodes Thursday and Sunday were so severe that I knew something was really wrong. And it had to be something I was ingesting.

So it seems that I’m probably malnourished, and that’s why I have been getting progressively weaker.

Apparently celiac disease has a genetic component. One of my parents had colon cancer many years ago, and more recently developed diabetes. Because of that, I’ve been watching my sugar intake. A sibling developed lactose intolerance, so I began watching, then recently limiting, my dairy intake. I’m not in contact with most of my family of origin, although one of my parents keeps trying to talk to me, against my express wishes, using various other relatives as intermediaries. Somehow, though, no one has ever tried to tell me to watch out for this (or any other health issue). I could have, would have, modified my diet years ago, if I’d known this was a possibility.

Last year when I found out that I had a health issue that is genetic, and according to known family history seemed to indicate only one side of my family, I contacted all of my siblings and all of my cousins on that side, as well as the one cousin on the other side that I was friendly with, to give them all a heads up. Only 1 of my 3 siblings, and the cousin from the other side, responded at all. Nobody else even said, “Gee, that really sucks for you.”

+++

Living with Spouse is a lovely contrast to growing up within my family of origin. Taking him as my partner saved my life and my sanity. Throughout this process, he has been such a rock of support and encouragement. I feel confident that our present and future hold many more surprises — even some pleasant ones! — and I’m looking forward to finding out what they are.

discipline, part 1

Every morning, I walk outside for at least 30 minutes. Then I come inside and eat breakfast.

I write every day. Sometimes it’s handwritten notes in one of my journals; sometimes it’s longer pieces that are dictated. I’m getting ideas for fictional stories.

I’m finding different ways to sit.

I’m meditating while standing, or walking around.

I’m listening to what my body tells me, and doing my best to figure out how to make things work better. Me and my body’s preferences are more important than what other people want or expect, especially when those things would be painful and/or distressing. I’m standing up for myself by figuring out ways that things could be done better for me, and then insisting that my preferences be considered.

I’m looking for people who fully inhabit their own emotions, and express them honestly, even when that makes them truly vulnerable. We’ve seen two films recently. George Clooney inhabited all sorts of complex and nuanced depths, and helped me feel them along with him, in The Descendants. But We Bought a Zoo was family-friendly ‘product’ where all the human actors were trying too hard, the script was a mess, and the animals deserved a better story to appear in.

I’m writing poems about difficult events in my past.

I’m rethinking my relationships to ‘control’ and ‘knowing’, because I don’t believe either are necessary or desirable. Which is frightening because the ideas run so counter to common sense, but it’s also intoxicating. I’m ‘flying blind’, but somehow I’m not crashing.

Discipline seems to be a tool, not a blueprint. I decide how it gets used.

experiment awry

Over the last 13 months, I’ve gradually discontinued a lot of familiar and almost-unnoticed habits, creating new ones largely by default. I’m only now realizing that their cumulative effect is rather unfortunate.

I stopped sitting up straight, and instead hunched over in various poses. I stopped doing targeted exercises (shoulder, back, abdomen, legs) regularly. I kept changing my diet, trying to add more foods that I like, but now most of those (liked) things are unhealthy. I knew from my physical therapists that I shouldn’t do any one activity for more than an hour or two without a break, but I continued to sit or lie in one spot and read or do computer things for long stretches of time (sometimes as much as 6-8 hours, with hardly any breaks). I stopped dancing. I’m a night owl, but I’ve taken staying up late to ridiculous extremes, then slept in until late morning (occasionally near noon) fairly regularly. I resisted doing anything that I didn’t want to do.

The idea of disciplined practice at various things (meditation, exercise, writing every day, etc.) kept popping up in my mind, but I always carefully explained to myself that “I was a ‘free spirit’, and discipline would clearly cramp my style. Hey, I’m not gonna live forever you know — I gotta do my thing(s) now, while there’s still time!”

So, the results are in, and this accidental experiment was mostly a disaster. Overall, I’ve become a blancmange. I’m in the worst physical shape of my life, which I’m reminded of every time I get winded walking a few blocks at a brisk pace. Since I’ve largely confined myself to only the most basic movements, I start feeling pain or discomfort right away whenever I start doing them, even if I just woke up. So now I have to consciously rotate my movements, with all sorts of body parts. Sitting, in any position, becomes painful very quickly. I’ve had to try all sorts of arrangements on chairs, and my bed. I’m now finding ways to stand and/or walk around more often. Yet, since I’ve also developed plantar fasciitis, standing and walking around have to be preceded by stretching my feet and ankle muscles, or else they hurt too. Sleeping more to compensate makes me groggy and cranky, so it’s that much harder to want to change these newish bad habits.

I’ve known for a least a year that I want to start cooking regularly. Not only have I not done that, but to myself, I’ve whined and complained that Spouse should do it for me. Even though I know that, were Spouse to learn to cook, the kind of foods he would want to eat would not really overlap mine very often, since he is a carnivore who doesn’t like vegetables or fruit, and I am mostly a vegetarian. (We do both like pasta and bread.)

Years ago, I read one of those books targeted to corporate business people about how to improve their productivity. It advocated that everyone should concentrate all of their effort on improving their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses. I thought the idea had some merit but I also thought it was probably unrealistic unless you were a CEO or something similar, because who else has the luxury of being in situations where your weaknesses will not be a problem? Every job I’ve ever had, and many interpersonal situations, have required me to deal with my weaknesses far more than they have allowed me to showcase my strengths. To me, that just seemed like how the world works: you can’t dictate the circumstances through which you interact with others, nor can you control how they think of you.

That’s been more of my problem right there. I rarely interact with anybody (human) in person. My world has narrowed so that I am largely in control of circumstances. Which is actually not just unprecedented but odd because I wasn’t directly seeking control at all. In fact, ‘control’ is something I’m always deriding as an illusion fostered by Judgers, who seem to be running the world, to the detriment of us Perceivers, who know better.

For a person who has fairly recently discovered that she really likes conflict (as long as it doesn’t become violent or dangerous), my accidental level of control has meant that I conflict with no one but Spouse.

I did know about inertia, of course I did, but I didn’t realize how easy it would be to take a bunch of incremental steps in a bunch of unrelated things and end up producing emergent phenomena that is precisely what I don’t want.

I’ve decided the antidote is committing to concrete goals, that don’t allow me to wiggle out when I don’t feel like doing something. Because I now know– only too well — that I may never feel like doing anything beforehand, but when I allow that to dictate my actions, I eventually become a bowl of pudding.

When I remove all obstacles and limits, there’s nothing to exercise my creativity against. My world narrows to only what I already find interesting — it’s much harder to surprise myself. Perhaps discipline is even more essential for free spirits.

tenderly embodied

Almost 10 years ago, I took a class in pottery, something I’d always been interested in but never tried. I never did get the hang of working on a pottery wheel — I was too tall and not sinuous enough to sit comfortably in that position — but I quickly realized that I really loved hand-building. I could sit down with a lump of clay and the barest germ of an idea, or no idea at all, and play with it until something evolved.

I also enjoyed experimenting with glazes in various combinations, with often surprising results. (Sometimes downright ugly, but sometimes beautiful, and everywhere in between.)

I still have many of the pieces I made during the three terms of pottery classes I ended up taking. I created many of them to be functional, so they hold oil pastels, dried rose petals, pencils and pens, paper clips, a handful of prickly Scottish heather, dirt, odds and ends I’ve picked up on walks.

Beyond occasionally swapping out their contents, I like handling the pieces themselves. With my eyes averted or closed, I run my fingers over walls that fit the curve of my hands, braided borders, oddly rough or bumpy sections, even some sharp edges. Only one piece is at all symmetrical, and that was an accident. Nothing looks or feels professionally made. Yet these are some of the works I’ve made that I’m proudest of. Making these pieces taught me more about what appeals to me, and what I love creating (as well as, what I don’t regret not being able to create), than years and years of painting and drawing, and reading, and thinking had.

I can pick up a ceramic piece that I made, 10 long years ago, and relive my discovery of a personal aesthetic. I can point out to someone else the qualities that matter the most, some of which you can see, but most of which you really need to feel, in both senses of the term (sense of touch, and emotions).

+++

I grew up feeling that being smart and living mostly inside my head would save me from forces trying to tear me apart. It was dangerous to feel too much, so I worked at staying abstracted and numbed. That was too drastic, so I tried to reenter the world of feeling, but not ‘too much’. Somewhere I got the idea that sensuality and hedonism and just admitting that people have bodies was akin to admitting that I wasn’t very bright, and that no one should take me seriously.

I aspired to be taken seriously, and being smart seemed like my best chance at it.

But it’s been a long and bumpy road. What I know, how I learn, happens by the ‘feel’ of things, not by logic or ‘rationality’. In fact, the major decisions I’ve made ‘using my head’ were all complete disasters. If instead I had teased out not just how I felt about the choice in front of me, but dug further to discover what I wasn’t allowing myself to want, and then pursued that … well, I would’ve had a totally different life.

I’ve pursued science all my life, but lately I’ve realized that, like both Christianity and secular humanism, science is not a good path for me. None of those paths are inclusive enough, because they all value human  beings over everyone else. And they all seem to value ‘thinking with your head’ not ‘thinking/feeling with your body’. I don’t want to transcend being a body; I want to revel in it, celebrate it.

But I seem much more sensitive to input than people who think with their heads. I’m easily overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, especially when social obligations are also present. It’s especially hard to navigate other people’s expectations when my body is telling me I need to get away from what’s happening, but there’s no socially acceptable way to say or do just that. I often find myself saying things, desperate to get away, that are social blunders. Spouse thinks I should always put other people’s expectations first, even beyond what I’m capable of dealing with. I can’t seem to get him to understand that when we get to the point where I’m being rude, it’s because I’m about to completely shut down. My spoons have completely run out, and I’m ‘running on fumes’. So I really can’t spare the energy to deal with other people’s reactions.

But then again, I know that I have anxiety disorders. I know what my body, my self, can bear, and what they can’t (because they tell me and I listen).  I put myself first.

Beginning with Sagittarius, I decided I would pay extra attention to what my body feels and is telling me. And then I would not perpetuate old ‘mental scripts’ about what that means. So, for example, I have trouble getting up in the morning. And once I wake up, I linger in bed, often thinking out loud. My old mental script (Mrs. Nocerino) would say I do those things because I’m lazy, and by implication, probably a ‘bad person’. My newer understanding, though, is that when I wake up, that’s often the best I feel all day physically. Once I get up and moving, I’m chilly and uncomfortable and often feel aches and pains. So, staying abed where I’m warm and cozy makes sense. Yeah, okay, I’m not gonna win awards for productivity, but so what? A lot of the most productive people I know manage that level of productivity by ignoring what their body is saying to them. (Which only works for so long.) I rarely get sick. Physically, I seem to be doing better than other people I know, so I think/feel I am doing things right for me, which is what matters most to me. How other people characterize my behavior is not something I have any control over.

So, I’m sitting at my laptop in my studio, cradling an osage orange in my hands, fingering its lime green cobbled skin, inhaling its citrusy scent, remembering the lovely walk in the woods this afternoon when I found it. Wondering which of the photographs I took will turn out. I inhabit my body, I am embodied, I am part of Earth’s body.

N: roundabout

To prepare for Nanowrimo, in October I set myself the goal of writing at least 1000 1666 1700 words per day. There were only two days that I did not write it all. The day that I wrote the least, I wrote 149 words; the day I wrote the second least, that amount was 870 words. I averaged 1767 words; my monthly total was 54,765 (3.9% above my goal).

Whatever I wrote might be used to fill the goal, as long as I put thought into it: blog posts, journal entries, significant comments on a blog, meaningful e-mails, handwritten ideas for further writing.

For November, I set myself 4 interrelated goals:

1. 50,000 words on my book;
2. 10,000 or more words on my blog, or other writings;
3. total words for the month >= 60,000;
4. average per day ~ 2,000 words.

I have only met Goal #2, and missed the other three by quite a large margin.

In October, I was inspired to write, more often than I would have otherwise. And every night when I added my daily word count to my chart, I was pleased, but also motivated to do more — to not only stay on track, but to exceed.

This month I wrote every day but three, but fewer than half of the days (n = 11) on my book, and less than a quarter (n = 5) on my blog. My interest in writing flagged pretty early, and it was very hard to continue.

Every time I thought about writing something that wasn’t my book, I felt the book’s metaphorical eyes on me. It was easier to stay away from my laptop altogether.

Tonight I was reading a book about how to write poetry, and it talked about why some poets use meter and rhyme, while others write in free verse. That poems need to find their own shape, their own rhythm, their own way. I’m personally not drawn to using meter and rhyme. I remember having to do that in sophomore English, but finding it very confining. And when the poem is read aloud, the sing-songy rhythm I would fall into often obscured the meaning to me. I like heading out on a journey, with no idea where I’m going. I like meanders and detours and surprises.

It was only today, after reading a different book yesterday, that I woke up thinking about something that could become a central idea in the book I tried to start writing 4 weeks ago. So this afternoon, I avoided the malevolent eye of my book, and wrote my thoughts down in a notebook in ink. I wrote five pages, filled with many paragraphs that do not connect to each other. Topics hopscotch from all corners of my life, and none of them are explicitly about the book. But thinking these thoughts plants seeds of larger issues that I will write about further, somewhere.

So can I include any of this writing in the column on my chart labeled Book? I don’t think so.

But if I scoured through the 30,000 some words I wrote this month, whose numbers appear in other (non-Book) columns, how many of them might also touch on themes, ideas, images, etc., that are connected to my book? If I was not trying to write this book — if I had not begun the Nanowrimo project — which waterfalls of words would I not have written? Which cascades of questions would I not yet have realized how they intertwine and entangle with long-held interests?

So if I compare my October chart with my November chart, the pre-Nanowrimo numbers are much more impressive. And the experience in October was much more pleasurable.

But October didn’t change me. The goal was strictly to attain the numbers overall. I now see that I wasn’t seeking to challenge myself enough. By succeeding, what did I prove except that I like writing (which I already knew)?

November has been hard. Not just because of the obvious ‘I’ve never written fiction before so I don’t know what I’m doing’, although that is part of it. I’ve sought out contentious ideas to read and think about. I’ve explored a bunch of ideas that seem intriguing but I can’t figure out how they might fit together. I’ve delved deeply into my own psyche, and found wondrous strangeness. I’ve reawakened my long-dormant inner poet.

I’m not the same person I was four weeks ago. I’ve changed.

Before, I was a writer. But now I’m a Writer. I take myself seriously in a way I did not imagine doing on October 31.

What I have achieved this month cannot be depicted on any chart. And talking about it might sound bombastic. So instead I’ll write, because that’s what I do.