On the road, writing and, somewhere, stillness

Dear Nancy:

As you know, I’ve been on the road, so it feels like months have passed since I’ve written you and read your last great letter about the life of writing and working. Work. As you described, “people working behind deli counters, or checking my groceries, or folding clothes at Target, or finding saw blades at hardware stores, or serving coffee and hotdogs and pizza and Cokes.” What I’ve been working with these last week is the public life of words.

First I traveled to the light-filled north for a conference in Alaska. I hiked to a glacier lake and then walked right back down into workshops and readings and a place full of the voices of those summoning stories. Back east, one day in between, and on to Pennsylvania, to Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and teaching at a residency. Then on from there to Buckhannon, West Virginia, for another full ten days of lectures and classes and readings and the fellowship of writers. And. Once I got home, there was none, really. My apartment was packed up and on its way to the house where we’ve moved, with a big, fat pod of more stuff I hadn’t seen in almost two years arriving two days later. Boxes and boxes and boxes. Seventy-five boxes of them, books. Do I need that copy of W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, from when I was twelve? Do I need that beat-up paperback copy of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow? And what about all the letters I’ve found? This, from a woman named Joan who I haven’t seen in a million years. She was talking about going to seminary. “…the spiritual side will give me a chance to study the ancient texts and ways…and I think it will humble me.”

I need the spirit right about now.

My brain is full and something like shiny sand is sifting out all the seams of my body and I’m tiredtiredtired. What, in all this madness of travel and work and relocation, happens to the writing life?

There hasn’t been any for weeks.

I’m full of everything but the silence inside necessary for writing.

Just yesterday, the wonderful woman I talk to these days, a Buddhist and a wise teacher of the spirit, told me a story. It was about two buckets held out to either side of a woman’s body. In one bucket is everything from the life outside. Jobs. Awards. Publications. Grants. Fellowships. Readings. The World. The other bucket is an old, rusty one. It is full of holes and water is pouring out of it.

That is the life inside.

What I have not done for years now is settle. Be still. Listen to the sound of water pouring out. Discover the nature of the holes in myself. Touch them. Be gentle with them and find ways to anoint the wounds. My favorite word today? Succour:

(noun) assistance and support in times of hardship and distress: the wounded had little chance of succour

(verb) give assistance or aid to: prisoners of war were liberated and succoured

Middle English: via Old French from medieval Latin succursus, from Latin succurrere ‘run to the help of’, from sub- ‘from below’ + currere ‘run’

There has been enough running. I need to be still. Raise my face to rain somewhere. Race my face up to the night silences in the yard behind this home we are making, the first house I’ve ever owned in my life. I need to give myself succor. Lick my wounds, the ones I’ve given myself all these years.

Words, I’m inviting you back in. I am listening.

Love,

Karen