My friend Andrea Nachtigall recently took me to see Mary Oliver at City Arts and Lectures in SF. There was a wonderful anticipatory hush before the poet came on stage, as if we were going to hear a really wonderful orchestra. Magic was hanging in the air, just waiting to be evoked. Mary Oliver read her poems, interspersed with talking to us about writing. Some of it was her way of writing, some of it was advice, some admonition. She had the whole auditorium completely mesmerized. I thought I’d share a few of her words of wisdom. Here are a few quotes and paraphrases:

·     *   I am very disciplined about working. You don’t accomplish anything without discipline. I write every day. It is an invitational.

 T    * The creative part of your mind is always there. You’ve got to keep a schedule. If you say to it “let’s meet at seven a.m.,” it will be there. You will struggle less.

·       * I go to the woods. They are my primary sources.

·      * I always carry a notebook. One needs to capture an idea as soon as it occurs.

·       * Silence is the door into the temple. If you ever go into the woods with me, I must love you very much.  (Adored this one. I only go into the woods with people I dearly love as well.)

And here, a poem by Mary Oliver.

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

 © Mary Oliver

May your pockets always be full of lichens and seeds and, of course, a notebook.

I have been sitting still today, thinking about whether sitting still is a good idea.

For a long time now, the easy answer to that would have been "Yes - good idea." But I can hear the idea of forward movement singing to me like a siren.

An image comes to me from an art history class in my undergraduate days at UC-Berkeley: A vase, painted by someone called "The Siren Painter," from about 500 B.C. On the vase is an image of Odysseus tied to a mast, the winged sirens tempting him and his crew toward shpwreck on the jagged rocks....

Of course, I'm not exactly taking the terms "sittling still" and "moving forward" literally. Both conditions are a state of mind, and both are also writing strategies - the language we use in our writing either lingers or moves ahead.

Sitting still involves slowing down all the nervous energy (or whatever part of my brain ushers in the constant noise-noise-noise, ba-boom-ba-boom ba-boom do-this-do-this-do-this) and allowing in more of the nuanced sensory input. When my body is still I hear birds whistling, I hear a neighbor sawing wood, I taste the cold red cherry on my tongue, I hear wind in the crabapple leaves, I notice two crows flying by, I smell the lavendar, I feel sunshine on my skin. I even feel, as Sarah Ellis felt in an earlier post, the pleasure of a pencil in my hand. No sensory detail goes in automatically, nothing is unnoticed when I sit still - instead, all my senses function with deliberation. My body recalibrates the volume and the speed at which the world confronts me.

Movement forward, on the other hand, gets me someplace. I don't just notice what's around me. I accept the adventure of ending up in new territory. Alain De Botton, in his book The Art of Travel, asks us to consider the appeal of going somewhere new. Sometimes, he says, we are drawn toward the exotic. Disappointingly, he reminds us, we sometimes take our old selves along for the ride. Wonderful book. I try to put it into the hands of all my friends, along with his other thought-provokingl book, Status Anxiety, which - now that I think of it -  questions our push to achieve, achieve, achieve. The drive to achieve also involves momentum - the desire to climb, yes? De Botton and I, it seems, have a shared curiosity about this thing called movement.

So I'm thinking about these mysteries  - my body, my writing, the seasons, the future -  as I sit still on my porch today. Deep Thoughts, which are fine for now, since it's summer, and Northrop Frye tells us summer is the season of full belief, the season we can allow ourselves to be less guarded. I know later I'll have shallow thoughts about what kind of sandwich to fix for lunch or wintery, murderous thoughts about weeds in my garden. But for now, some deep thoughts will do no harm. I tell myself I have room for the love of both sitting still and moving. But I've been playing it safe for a long time. Adventure appeals less. Why? 

Maybe it's because I believe God is in the details. My stillness then would be about staying in a space that is sacred. Details blur when you move, but maybe it's time for something a little less heavenly, a little messing about, a little suspense, a little action? Is itime to get my hands dirty? I can feel my heart rate going up. Why does movement forward feel almost transgressive?

Sitting still - is it the strategy of lyric poetry? Movement forward - is it the stategy of fiction?  I keep promising myself I'll write some fiction, but "Oh, my god," says that little voice in my head again,"fiction requires a plot, and plots move forward." Now my heart is really pounding. Here come the sirens, here come the jagged rocks...!! 

Odd thought: If this were a race, sitting still would be winning. That's counter-intuitive, isn't it? Sitting still runs faster than running ahead? Another odd thought: Do other writers out there wonder why the word "maybe" ends up in so much of their work? Do they wonder why their writing is filled with question marks?

Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist and poet, once said, "A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer." Maybe I'll sit on my porch a bit longer, riddling away. Yes, I'll do that. Mark Twain knew how to sit on a porch. I'll practice being Mark Twain. But no piloting a steamboat down the Mississippi River. Not today.