What does it mean to be a creative soul in a challenging and often uncreative universe?
How can we tackle those challenges to embrace our inner creativity in whatever form it takes?
To inspire you on your journey, here are some hopefully helpful snippets and contemplations from my life as a writer, activist, and wannabee musician–the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly stuff I’m grateful for!
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Usually when blogging time rolls around each week, I have an idea I’m inspired to write about. But sometimes the blank page–or in this case, the blank screen–taunts me with its glaring emptiness. And all the judgment questions start tumbling out:
Have I run out of things to say?
Has anything I’ve said in the past two weeks, two months, two years been remotely interesting?
Why am I even doing this?
These questions don’t just pertain to blog posts. They attach themselves to poems, stories, essays–anything I might be writing or revising. If I happen to be working on something larger, doubts spill out of the cracks like little cockroaches, making me want to do absolutely anything–clean all the toilets in the universe if I have to–in order not to go back to the sickening slog of that rickety “Work in Progress.”
Not a great place to be right now, as I promised to somehow write 30 poems in the month of November as a fundraiser for the Center for New Americans.
I’m telling myself poems are just words. And this blog post, too–just words.
When I’m stuck, I often start with what’s outside my window. At the moment, two gorgeous maples are shining through the last hurrah of the foliage. I could give myself a skill-building exercise and try to describe them, literally or metaphorically, but instead I think I’ll just include a couple of pictures–which are supposed to be worth a thousand words, far more than I need to write right now.
For what it’s worth, instead I’ll touch on the multitude of feelings that arise during this season: the dread of darkness encroaching earlier and earlier into the afternoons and the still coldness settling in, the poignancy of all that superimposed with the current glorious glint of the sunlight on the multicolored leaves. Every day that tinge of foreboding: will this be the last truly beautiful day we’ll have until spring?
And often, a similar question we creatives face: Will this be the last successful poem we ever write? The last painting? Last song? Last story?
Mindfulness instructs us to stay in the present–not to ruminate on the past or worry about the future. Yet, this is easier said than done. I’m not sure why it feels so important to anticipate more words in my future that need to be spilled and polished, but thinking that there might not be can feel almost as scary as imagining no more food, or no more air.
But in the spirit of mindfulness, I’m just going to enjoy these trees and trust in the universe. After all, spring does eventually return. The land rests, then rejuvenates. Recognizing writer’s block as part of a similar natural cycle can help us ride the troughs in creativity. As one visual artist friend told me, Good coffee needs to percolate. So do we.
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So many tabs… so little time. That’s what my computer browser window looks like. Picture the virtual equivalent of a very messy desk. I have a tendency to keep things open far longer than I need to, often to the point where I can’t even see what’s up there. And even when I try to do a clean sweep, (which I do attempt every few days) usually half the tabs stay open. There’s my theasaurus, my yoga site, my calendar, text message tab, email, weather–things I do use nearly every day. But also there’s articles I plan to read, actions I’m planning to do and/or publicize, shared docs I’m in the middle of working on, organizations I might donate to, events I might attend–a whole slew of things that sometimes stick around for months.
Like the weekend-long singing workshop I hemmed and hawed over since I found out about it in August.
Yes, I should go, I kept telling myself. But I hadn’t done any serious choral singing since my bout with dysphonia a few years ago. And even though I’d recovered most of my singing ability after a year of voice lessons, I still didn’t trust myself to be able to sustain my part in a chorus, or to be able to sing consistently for more than a few minutes.
What if I just start croaking and can’t sing at all? What if I don’t like it? What if my raspy voice brings everyone down? How am I going to be able to sing for a whole weekend when sometimes I can’t even sing for twenty minutes? The questions streamed through my mind.
Still, I didn’t delete the tab. Even after conflicting events would have provided an easy excuse not to go. It was No Kings Day on Saturday. And on Sunday our immigration justice affinity group had been invited to do our short street theater style performance amplifying stories about people in Massachusetts who had been been abducted by ICE as part of a local church service. I just kept being non-committal about all of these options until a few days before the workshop, when I signed up. Just so I wouldn’t talk myself out of it.
Long story short: The workshop was fantastic.
On Friday evening and all day Saturday we learned nine songs. In five different languages. On Sunday we performed them.
Were they perfect? Of course not. But one of the workshop leaders said, Don’t think of any concert as a performance; think of it as a party.
Photo: Shel Horowitz
And while perfection is always an illusion even when there’s way more time to polish, according to my partner and other acquaintances in the audience–as well as my own discerning ears–the songs we performed were totally pleasing to listen to.
And I was happily surprised how well my voice, buoyed by a large thermos of tea, held up. Even more fun was the challenge of learning parts quickly and the novelty of singing tenor instead of alto for many of the selections. And wonderful to be in a group of strong singers who were absolutely chill about the experience. And with encouraging leaders who said things like, don’t worry if you can’t reach that note, just mouth it and trust that your neighbor can do it.
I’ve been telling myself for over a year that I want to go “chorus shopping” but I’ll admit I’m picky about singing experiences. Choruses where parts are too easy or where everyone sings in unison tend to bore me after a while, especially when everything is pitched way higher than is comfortable for my new older-age voice. And I’m also realistic about recognizing my singing limitations, so I’ve shied away from harder and more demanding choruses. But this experience was perfect in every way.
I’m so glad I went for it.
Of course, one never knows. It could have turned out not to be as good as it was. I could have hated all the songs, or felt out of my league, or bored, or my voice could have tanked on the first night. So the experience brings up the question in all of us of when we might or might not choose to take a plunge into an unknown outcome. While there’s no clear set of variables to make a decision, I’m thinking about applying what I’ll call a “joy ratio.” If this does turn out the way I want, how much joy will it bring me? I can ask myself. And if the answer is a large amount of joy–I literally felt clouds of stress lifting off me, and (key litmus test) I stopped thinking about all the other things I had to do, then risking the outcome is absolutely worth it.
So, (in the words of Arlo) if you find yourself in a similar situation, you also might want to consider the joy ratio. And if it looks to be large, then take the plunge and go for it.
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In 2020, I stood at the Brownsville, Texas airport on Valentine’s Day watching shackled people hobble up the runway of this plane. And every day in 2026, all over the country, people are being arrested, detained, and deported without due process and often to countries where their lives are in danger. Even where I live in Massachusetts, where many towns and cities have passed sanctuary and other protective laws and resolutions, and where the state has recently passed legislation limiting ICE activities in courts, schools, and health care facilities, no one is truly safe.
So, in addition to spending significant time as an activist and advocate for immigrants, I have pledged each November to write 30 poems to support the Center for New Americans, an organization that provides English classes, legal advocacy, and countless other kinds of assistance to immigrants in our community.
Writing 30 poems in a month isn’t easy, and every October as I think about signing up again, a part of me panics at the thought of having one more thing to accomplish on my daily to-do list, even if there’s no pressure for all of the poems to be good–or even finished. But I do this anyway as a way of speaking out against the horrendous unleashing of ICE in our communities, and their blatant disregard for human life as they separate children from parents; arrest and detain American citizens, green card holders, and immigrants with legal status as well as those who lack documentation; and recklessly break into people’s homes, shoot people in cars, and murder Americans who have shone up to witness in peaceful protest.
It is a f-ing scary world we’re living in right now. And while we can be hopeful for the midterms, history has shown us that we can’t depend on Democrats to take care of things if they do attain majorities. We need to keep speaking up and speaking out. For a list of easy actions, Massachusetts residents can check out this link from DeICEhanscom.org. And people throughout the country can sign up at https://www.de-iceaction.org/ for one quick action to be delivered to your inbox each week.
Also, we can donate to some of the many immigration support networks that are out there. I’d be totally honored if you’d like to include the Center for New Americans on your list by donating to my fundraising page, here. In appreciation, I promise to send you my 30 poems at the end of the month. And I also promise that you are under no obligation to read them. Life is short and time is precious.
I do need to be honest and say that this is not a totally selfless mission. As a writer, I’ve gotten great benefit out of past 30 Poems in November efforts–and even a few good poems in the process. The obligation to face the blank page every day is helpful, even if words don’t always flow as smoothly as I might like them to. And coming together several times a month by attending workshops and readings with other community writers who are involved in this effort has been incredibly nurturing, because, utlimately, community feels like the only thing that will save us–and save those most vulnerable around us.
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Tell me the small stuff, my friend says to me on the phone. She hears the hesitation in my voice in the way I say okay after the customary how are you.
And it is small stuff that’s throwing me off kilter at the moment. Though actually the objects themselves are big. Squash. Fifteen huge butternut squashes dragged in at dusk because of frost warnings. A large recycle bin that was too heavy for two of us to carry, even though the house guest who was helping me was a young 30-something. And because this squash had not grown in the garden, but was a volunteer sprouting out of the compost pile into the grass that we hadn’t cut for months out of fear of damaging our bounty, its skin was wet and mottled, meaning that it was not going to comfortably store until we got around to using it. We had to process the bundle ASAP, before rot or mold set in.
I just picked 15 squashes, I told my friend. And now on top of everything else on my to-do list, I have to cook and freeze them.
Shel will help, right?
Of course, Shel (my partner) will help. Shel will likely insist that in addition to cooking these 15 squashes, we must roast every single seed from their inner cavities, because it would be a travesty to waste them, even though separating the seeds through all that pulp will add hours to the process. But he can do that. I will need to be the one to scrape the pulp out of the squash, because he doesn’t do it to my standards. And likely, I’ll end up doing most of the peeling after it’s cooked, because he’s always been challenged by intensive fine motor tasks. And then likely, he will scrape out whatever smidgeons of squash I’ve inattentively left on the peels, because he sees detail that I will often miss–sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
But in the end, we’ll have squash for the entire winter. So this should be a great project. It could even be fun if it didn’t feel like one more thing in my pile-up of things I never get to, which continue to scratch on the doors of my mind, louder and louder like a Halloween ghost.
I tell my friend, I don’t think of myself as having classic ADD, but what I do have is ADD of “the shoulds”–meaning that whatever I’m doing, my attention keeps wandering to something else I need or want to do, which minimizes both my enjoyment of what I am doing and my ability to pay mindful attention to it. And then I think about a parable I recently heard about the Dalai Lama, who, when asked what was the happiest moment in his life, paused for a moment and said, I think it’s right now. Because in the mindset of mindfulness, the past and the future don’t exist. All that remains is the moment, the right now of where we are.
So, I mentioned this to my friend, who has a much clearer understanding of Buddhist practice and meditation than I do, even though we both still struggle, and she agreed–with the mindfulness part, at least. She hates cooking and would never want to process 15 squashes, mindfully or not.
I was glad to feel a little better when I got off the phone. Gratitude to friends who see through my wimpy “okays” and tell me that’s what friends are for when I apologize for harping on the latest trivial obstacle in my rich and abundant life, for which I truly am grateful. My next to-do was a check-in call to my 92-year old mom. As we talked, I processed 5 of the squashes for roasting. When I got off that call, I found takers for several of the remaining butternuts, leaving us only 2 or 3 more to process. Nothing more gratifying than sharing your abundance.
In the morning, I woke to a delicious smell of something baking in the oven. After overcoming the initial disappointment that it wasn’t muffins, I felt grateful to Shel for starting his morning by roasting the squash, along with one tray of seeds he’d picked out of the huge bowl of pulp I saved for him.
In the three minutes I had while waiting for my toast, I managed to peel half of one of the roasted squashes, cut it into chunks, and put it on a tray in the freezer. Still, a long road ahead, but hey, there’s no road. Only the moment.
And though I’m not supposed to think of the future, I know that come winter, I will enjoy squash bread; squash soup; squash pie; squash custard; Chilean-inspired squash with cheese, onions and tomatoes; Indian-inspired squash with curry and coconut milk, Carribean-inspired squash with dried fruit and ginger, and countless other recipes I haven’t yet invented.
And if my friend, who lives far away, comes to visit. I’ll make sure to cook her a nice dinner.
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Herbert Lanks, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
High above Cayuga’s waters
There’s an awful smell
Some say it’s Cayuga’s waters
Some say it’s Cornell…
I can’t honestly say whether the story of the Cornell gang rape would have hit me as hard as it did if I weren’t a Cornell alum. I’m sure that any similar story, no matter where it happened, would evoke the same reactions of revulsion, anger and despair, but its association with a place I idolized as the turning point in my escape into my own life opens up even deeper wounds.
Thankfully, I was not a victim of sexual assault at Cornell. My “me-too” stories–far tamer, but still incidents that never should have happened–took place at other locales. They include gropes on the rush-hour subway when I was a young teen, some asshole in hip, liberal Northampton MA calling out from the parking lot by the Thornes Market walkway to lift up my shirt so he could see my breasts, and a post-graduation trip to southern France with my college boyfriend where a strange hand unzipped our tent in the middle of the night and reached into my sleeping bag to fondle me. When I woke enough from my fuzzy sleep and figured out that this hand was not the hand of the person sleeping beside me, I screamed, and the hand slowly withdrew, zipped up the tent flap, and disappeared into the darkness.
My boyfriend woke up and when I told him what happened he said, “I can understand where he was coming from. He must have been horny seeing all those topless women at the beach.”
Just thinking about his response makes the air stick in my throat all over again. Should I be surprised that he was also a Cornell alum, even if he wasn’t a frat boy? The crowd I traveled in–artsy folks tinged with a love of sci-fi and re-enacting the Middle Ages–stayed as far away from frats as possible. Even 50 years ago, when overt sexism and objectification of women was much more of a cultural norm, the women in my orbit, all knew that frat parties could mean serious trouble,
I’d like to think that 50 years of feminist consciousness raising would have made more of a difference in what’s considered acceptable behavior on a college campus. But despite the administrator’s milquetoast statements–straight out of the crisis communication playbook I taught my business students at UMass for 20 years (deny and minimize offensiveness of the act)–there’s an underlying maxim that boys will be boys. A short suspension, perhaps an essay-writing assignment (which the administration denies, but whether or not it’s true, is it that much different from writing I shall not rape on a blackboard 100 times?) a generic “rape is bad” statement, and a pretense of an investigation where they claim to not have found enough evidence, and all can be well. Until the next incident. Nowhere do they apologize: to the victim, or to the rest of the women on campus. And though the Cornell administration does make a few hand-wringing remarks about the awfulness of the incident, nowhere do they say what strong and definitive steps they’ll take to change a campus culture where drugging and raping women is just part of the party.
But this may be because Cornell can’t singlehandedly change a culture that’s pervasive in all our institutions. Just look at the personal histories of the current leaders of our country. And we wring our hands, because boys will be boys. In 2016 when the current occupant of the White House jolted the airwaves with his “grab ’em by the p*ssy” remark, it should have been the end of his campaign. Instead he got elected. And elected again.
Jane Doe deserves not only an apology from Cornell. She deserves to have her entire tuition refunded (which she requested and they denied). She also should have free access on Cornell’s dime to the school of her choice. And while I’m glad that the prosecutor is re-opening an investigation, I’m not in favor of prison for the Cornell 7, because the prison system is also part of the problem. I do think those that graduated should have their degrees revoked with felonies noted on their record. And if there were an effective program to get these men and others to truly understand the daily harms committed because of this cultural mindset, and a way for them to spend thousands of community service hours educating others on respectful treatment of women, that would be true restorative justice.
And I also think they should be branded as sex offenders for the rest of their lives–as should the many others who commit similar acts and get away with them. But nothing will really change even then, until the term “sex offender” actually means something.
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I was planning to blog about tackling Bruch’s Kol Nidre last week, a piano/cello duet centered on the prayer that opens the Jewish Holiday of Yom Kippur. And then I realized I wrote a piece about this very topic three years ago.
This shouldn’t have been surprising, since every year I tend to drag this piece out of my small collection of sheet music to help me connect to the holidays. I am ambivalent about many aspects of traditional Jewish practice but I absolutely love this piece of music, even as I’m still struggling to play it at a level anywhere near my bar of satisfaction.
I was surprised when I read my previous post that I described my experience as mostly positive. But perhaps that was because I gave myself more time to dig into it. This year, I didn’t bring out the piece until a week before the holiday, thinking that the arrangement I found on-line, which was solely for piano rather than piano/cello, would be easy enough to re-learn quickly with all those extra years of practice and so much prior familiarity. I don’t know whom I was kidding. What I will confess is that after three days of what felt like torturing myself, I gave up.
Too late to learn this in time for Yom Kippur. Next year I’ll start a month ahead.
Or maybe three months ahead.
Or maybe on Passover.
But what did impress me, and what was different was that I didn’t mentally beat myself up for throwing in the towel, as I might have in previous years. I didn’t unleash the litany of my self-critic, Eloise, nagging on about what a terrible musician I was: yada, yada, yada. I just said to myself, I don’t have the capacity to learn this right now, and put the pages aside.
And on Yom Kippur eve, the only time I go to services outside of b-mitzvahs or my mother requesting my yearly witness for reading the Torah, I went to my local synagogue and heard two high school students, Ben and Amita, play this piece with effortless elegance and grace. This is a wicked hard piece of music (at least, in my humble opinion) but their performance did not center on virtuosity. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a performance; they just played from the heart.
In one of the Jewish practices I’ve become attached to, taking the entire month before the New Year (Elul) to work in tandem with a chevruta (spiritual friend) to reflect on our life and contemplate renewal for the new year, we’ve talked about the notion of a labyrinth–how each year, it can feel frustrating to be confronting the same issues; yet, we’re still going slowly forward and around, so that we’re not stuck in the same place. We’re facing them from a different point in the circle. So here I am writing about playing Kol Nidre again–but from a different point on the labyrinth. And while next year, I might dream of playing this piece with half the fluidity of Ben and Amita, that probably isn’t going to happen. Even if I decide to start re-learning it tomorrow and make it a year-long project.
Yet, whether I’m curious to see what will happen and where I’ll be on the labyrinth next year. Maybe, I won’t even want to challenge myself with this hard piece of music. Maybe I’ll suddenly become enamored with tap dancing or bungee jumping. Or maybe I’ll decide my true calling is improvising my own musical melodies. Or maybe I will dig in early enough to see what learning it can teach me. In any of these cases, I’ll be learning something about myself, ideally with a focus on the newness of the moment, rather than on all the past baggage.
And if we think of any moment as a brand new opportunity, what a wealth of possibilities that could bring to healing–not only ourselves, but to the many troubles experienced today in the world.
Shana Tovah!
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Rose_Papa_Meilland.jpg
Thirty-four years ago, on Rosh Hashanah, I stood on the banks of the Connecticut River and ceremoniously, with the help of my chavurah, changed my name to Dina, a name I have now had for nearly half my life.
I’d been playing with the name change for about a year. My birth name, Deborah, never felt like it fit me. In fact, the only people who ever called me Deborah were my mother when she was angry at me, and a third grade teacher I didn’t like. Debbie, the diminutive I did identify with, was beginning to feel more and more childish, but shortening it to the more adult, “Deb” always felt like something was cut off, or like the name of a sports jock, not a poet.
Another reason I made the switch: there were so many Debbies in my life, I felt boxed in by the herd. Two of my close friends growing up were also named Debbie. And I can’t even count the number of times, I’d call a schoolmate. This is Debbie, I would say. And they would say, Which one? Which made me feel so anonymous and inconsequential. To make things even worse, there was an up and coming folksinger named Debbie Friedman, and a few people thought it was me. I didn’t know you sang, they said. Since one of my secret ambitions had always been to be a folksinger, I was miffed that this other Debbie Friedman had made the cut when I hadn’t.
So it was definitely time to break out of the box and become my own person.
I chose Dina because I wanted to stick with a D-name that sounded Jewish and was easy to pronounce. I also wanted it to be different, but not too different–just a little off the beaten track. While transitioning into the change I wrote my name as Debbie Dina Friedman, which I then changed to D. Dina Friedman on the official state documents a few months after that Rosh Hashanah ritual, paying the 60 bucks and being officially done with my birth name.
If I could do it again, I’d dump the initial D in front. I still like it, but it creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic hassles, similar to those my partner and I saddled our kids with when we gave them a double unhyphenated last name. But other than that, I’ve been very happy with the name change, which helped me open to seeing myself in a new way. And I was grateful to the many family members and friends who gracefully transitioned to calling me by the name I wished to call myself.
My parents, however, were hurt by my rejection of the name they chose for me, and continued to call me by my birth name. Being a parent myself, I understood their unhappiness, but ultimately, this should be just one more step in parenting’s continuous process of letting go. My father, to his credit, would call me Dina when my mother wasn’t listening, but I could tell he struggled to do it. My mother, to her credit, addresses envelopes to Dina (or usually just D.–I guess that was the reason I kept the D. before Dina) but still continues to call me by my birth name.
As my family sat around the table this Rosh Hashanah, our conversation suddenly turned to road apps–how to find a decent one that did not succumb to the arbitrary renaming of Lake Ontario. While I do believe, as Shakespeare said, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and that we have the absolute right to change our own names, we do not have the right to unilaterally change the names of things around us, especially when there are others involved with equal stakes in the outcome.
Fantasizing is fun when you’re three or four. My grandson erupts into laughter if all of a sudden he’s Grandma and I’m Manu, or if both of our names are Poop and his preschool teacher is Miss Poopy. But at some point, we need to grow up and face the fact that renaming a body of water, or plastering your own name on an arts center dedicated as a memorial to a much better person than you does not change the hard reality of who you are. Even when I became Dina, I didn’t magically morph into the wiser, cooler me I might have wished to become. (And I didn’t become a folksinger, either.) I was still me with all my quirks and flaws, though perhaps with a little less self-limiting baggage, and a clearer vision of who I could be if I worked for it. But that’s the operating word: working for it.
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True confessions: I subscribe to far more Substacks, blogs, writing sites, daily poems, daily prompts, magazines, news reports, activist mailing lists, and social media groups, than I can possibly keep up with.
So my day begins with a delicate dance of choosing what to read and what to ignore. Actually, I’ve revised my habits so my day begins with a brief meditation followed by 30 minutes of exercise before I even look at the onslaught of text in my email box, but once I’ve opened the lid on my laptop, the rush is on. So many little tentacles of info competing for my attention, and all of them are just a small slice of the wider pie of projects and activities I’ve committed to, not to mention the obligations of maintaining my home, nurturing my family, and being a good friend to the many people who matter to me.
Somehow, I don’t think this issue is uniquely my problem. Likely, many of us are swamped by the competition between our life’s obligations and our desires for how we might want to spend our time. Being rained on by torrents of electronic words only adds to the flood.
So, I get it when I write a blog post and there are absolutely no reactions. But it’s still an eerie feeling–like shouting into the void.
Artist: Sam White; retrieved from newgrounds.com
Does *anybody* hear me? Does *anyone* think what I’m writing is worth listening to?
Absolutely not, says my inner critic, whom I’ve decided to name Eloise. No one cares about your stupid weekly dribbles.
Should I stop blogging? It could be a relief to take one more thing off my to-do list!
My initial reason for starting a blog was to do what all authors are told they need to do. The goal–stated by every marketing workshop I attended and every resource I read was to build a platform by acquiring a large degree of subscribers. That never happened, and as I’m not generally someone who plays the long-term patience game, I could have quit after the first year, when my most recent books were considered old news anyway. But the surprising thing was that I found I really liked blogging. Taking the time to think about some tidbit from my life or the wider world and its relationship to the themes I’m passionate about–creative expression and social change–has been invigorating. And trying to encapsulate that thought into a short 500-800 word post has been a formidable and stimulating writing challenge.
Besides, Substack continues to seduce me with a challenge of how many weeks in a row I can post a blog. And this is something I can control, even if I can’t control the number of people in my subscriber base.
What’s also satisfying is the feeling that I’m not just spouting words on paper to an amorphous audience. I’m writing to a bunch of friends, as most of my subscribers are people I know. (And I’d love to meet the rest of you!) Because of that, I’m determined to stay authentically myself and not hide behind some ostensibly wiser but more distant “author mask.” And it tickles me thinking that if you’re able to take some of your very precious time to read some of these musings, it might lead to more connection between us. If you react, or comment, or let me know in some way, then I can feel more connected, too.
Which is why the posts with no reactions at all leave me a bit lonely and off-kilter. But seriously, no shade! I wish I could read every Substack post from every single friend I subscribe to, and I can’t. Though I do try to prioritize reading posts written by friends so that I can get to at least some of them some of the time. And I’m going to make it a point to react more, because I often read and don’t react–out of busyness, or laziness, and now I’m realizing how great it would be if if the void I’m shouting into could echo back. Yes! I hear you!
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