Learning From My Dog

Posted on July 19, 2023 by dinafried

Last night I finished Christian McEwen’s excellent book, World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down. McEwen explores several ways to nurture creativity, a difficult task in a culture that revolves around overactivity and excessive screen-time. One of my favorite suggestions (and a practice I already regularly engage in) is walking in nature. I learned this from my husky-shepherd, Lefty, who quickly made it clear that the key to keeping him calm was a long off-leash walk in the woods every day. I found this break so nourishing, I’ve continued the practice. Even though he’s been gone for 12 years, I make a point of walking daily in all kinds of weather. And when I need an extra nudge to get my tired or tense torso out the door, I channel the ghost of my four-legged personal trainer, remembering that even at the very end of his life, he’d battle his own demons of arthritis, fatigue and lethargy for the joy of being in the woods.

Many cultures have recognized the benefits of nature walking. The Japanese even have a word for this: shinrin-yoku, which translates as forest-bathing. Devotees of shinrin-yoku recommend that you go into the forest without your phone or your camera, and with as little of an agenda as possible. It’s not even necessary to go anywhere. Simply follow your eyes, ears, nose, and feet, and immerse yourself in all the sensations the woods have to offer. This advice melds nicely with some of McEwen’s other suggestions around cultivating creativity: resisting “hurry sickness” (the idea that you have to complete a task to get to the next one), taking the time to observe your surroundings closely (with all your senses, not just your eyes), and paying more attention to the silence and the pauses between actions.

Having now read McEwen’s book, along with articles on shinrin-yoku, I can see that while I’m glad to have a nature-walking practice, I’m not yet skilled in engaging in it with this kind of quality. I’m often thinking about how long (or how little time) I can spend, and I’m often rushing up the trails I’ve chosen, setting an agenda that will give me good physical exercise, but not necessarily the best workout for my mental and creative health.

So again, I’m going to channel Lefty’s ghost, remembering that he had no agenda when he walked, and often wandered off on his own, following his nose for potentially tasty morsels, finding muddy puddles to roll in, and once making friends with a wandering coyote. I’m not about to squat at every tree or chase squirrels, but other than that, I’m wondering what it would it be like to walk in the woods with the mindset of a dog. To saunter along and sniff at whatever touches my fancy, and occasionally run my heart out for the thrill of the rush of the wind on my face?

How to truly take in the lesson that I don’t always have to have an agenda, a checklist, a time limit? Dogs don’t care about time. Why should I?

Time keeps on slipping… slipping… slipping… into the future. So says the well-known song by the Steve Miller Band. We can’t change that, but we can cultivate a sense of expanded time, by reining in our busy-ness and paying attention to what’s around us, especially the silence and pauses between actions, as McEwen says. Yes, I know that stopping to smell the flowers is a well-worn cliché, but when was the last time we actually did that?

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Navigating the Unexpected

Posted on July 12, 2023 by dinafried

On the day after Hurricane Irene, I woke up and looked out my window and saw that the river had completely covered the fields across the street from my house. As the water lapped at the edge of the road, I wondered if I’d be trapped. We are on high ground, but our only way out is Route 47 North or South unless we want to walk across the Mt. Holyoke Range, or get hold of a canoe. Many of our neighbors have showed us pictures of their families escaping on boats during the historical floods of 1936 and 1938, which are commemorated by the flood marker I pass every day, about a mile north of my house.

The flooding from Irene never got to the road, thanks to the Hadley DPW trucks and their well placed distribution of sandbags, but I did lose my entire garden, which had been in one of the fields by the river. A truly sad day, even though the tomatoes were pretty much done and we’d already enjoyed several months of the harvest.

My garden is now on higher ground

closer to the house, and the flooding on the river plain in my neighborhood has been far less than we anticipated this time. When I look across the street I see deep pools, similar to what’s common in the spring, where people sometimes stand on the road and fish, though some of the corn is clearly lost.

However many farms in the area including two that I feel personally connected to: Grow Food Northampton, Mountain View Farm and Stone Soup Farm lost nearly all of their crops. And north of us in Vermont, the situation is much worse, with many homes and businesses devastated.

I often find myself pondering what I would do in face of tragedy, especially the sudden, unexpected kind that threatens the foundations on which I live my life: family, home, sustenance, livelihood. And the thought brings me right back to the week I spent in Matamoros on the Mexican border, walking past wet and sagging tents perched in the hot, muddy field, talking to people who lost everything when tragedy forced them to leave their home countries, people whose only remaining possession is hope.

My husband (who’s always been more attached to food than I am) still occasionally grumbles about the burgeoning crop of sesame seeds we lost in the Irene flood, which we’ve never been able to successfully reproduce. But in reality it was no big deal to lose my garden that summer. I’ve led an exceptionally privileged life whose tragedies, while still difficult, are expected outcomes in the cycle of life and death that all of us on the planet endure. And while sometimes acknowledging that privilege makes me edgy, it also reminds me of my responsibility to participate in tikkun olam, the healing of the world, and to feel gratitude for all that I have.

The farmers at Mountain View write, “We are going to take things one step at a time as we plan for how to proceed. We will continue to distribute farm shares with our heads held high for as long as we can with what we have left.” This seems in line with the mindset of many of the people I spoke with on the border. Despite how bleak their situation appeared, they kept pressing on, determined to get through each day and take one step closer to their dreams, no matter how unachievable they might seem.

Good advice–for all of us, no matter what our state of privilege/challenge might be and no matter how essential our goal(s) might be to our ability to survive. That, along with my meditation app’s suggestion of 10 deep breaths, a reset, and a step forward.

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Setting Intentions

Posted on July 5, 2023 by dinafried

For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with The Artist’s Way technique of writing three long-hand pages before getting out of bed in the morning as way to clear out detritus, set a tone for the day, and hopefully get to some inspirational creative nugget. Though the nuggets have been few and far between for me, I’ve found the process useful in breaking the habit of going right to my phone with its tasky emails and social media rants about disturbing items in the morning’s news cycle.

It’s also been useful to write down intentions of what I’d like to accomplish for the day, remembering that I don’t need to beat myself up for not completing everything I’ve set out to do; I just need to remind myself of the direction I’ve set, and gently pivot back if I’m veering off-course (or re-assess if the new course I’m on seems more right for the moment). Since I’m still in the throes over-achiever recovery, my intentions can sometimes feel like a laundry list of everything I might like to get done, as impossible to pull off as finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But seeing, day after day, how ridiculously long my lists can be, and taking time to express gratitude for what I have achieved at the end of each day has been helpful in setting my sights a tad more realistically.

I was discussing this a few days ago with Alice, my chevrutah, which loosely translates from Hebrew as a “learning partner.” Instead of studying Jewish texts, we’ve chosen to expand the Jewish practice of self-reflection and forgiveness during Elul (the month before New Year’s) into an ongoing practice of checking-in on personal growth, taking inspiration from Jewish and non-Jewish spiritual teachings, as well as in the countless gifts we get every day from immersing in the creative process and engaging with the natural world. Alice told me that the Hebrew word for intention, kavanah, is not so much about the tasks you aim to get done, but the quality with which you approach them.

So, for the last few days as I’ve written my list, I’ve expressed the kavanah to pay more attention and be more connected to whatever it is I’m doing, rather than thinking of it as an item to be quickly ticked off so I can get to the next thing as soon as possible.

Surprisingly, this has made me more relaxed in my writing practice. I’m not so worried about what the next big project might be, or if I’m doing the most important thing right now on my writing “to-dos.” I’m setting one writing intention a day of something to focus on and trying my best not to second-guess myself (which includes actively choosing not to write on days that are exceptionally busy, rather than feeling distracted and harried as I try to squeeze it in). And when a new path opens up (i.e. in the middle of doing submissions, a poem begs for a rewrite or a few lines pop into my head, or I get a brilliant idea for a new story) I let myself wander off the path, the way my husband and I often follow unmarked trails in the woods, confident that we know the local forests (just as I know my own internal map) well enough to find our way back home.

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Self-Sabotage: The Minefield of Shortcuts

Posted on June 27, 2023 by dinafried

Yesterday, I slipped on a wet floor and banged up my knee. And today, I’m determined to baby it. So no yoga class, and certainly no race-walking or bouncing around to cardio videos. This is a huge break in my pattern of always physically trying to do as much as I can despite whatever minor discomfort I’m experiencing. But it’s time to face the fact that I’m older; my body is more compromised, and the last thing I want to do is let a small injury turn into a large one because I didn’t give it time to heal.

Meanwhile, my hungry mind is alluring me with alternatives. Maybe I can do a restorative yoga video, or try a flat, non-strenuous half-hour walk. Or find a spot where I can sit at the edge of the garden and pull a few weeds. Since my knee doesn’t really hurt that much, these messages sound tantalizingly sensible, even though I know I should make sure to be careful. Still, what’s wrong with taking a couple of shortcuts to make my day feel more settled and normal?

And is my resistance to having a day with minimal physical activity connected to knowing that if I don’t do any of these routines, I’ll have a lot more time–i.e. too much time–to face the blank page?

Sometimes I wonder if filling up my days with routines–even healthy routines–is one of the ways I sabotage my creativity. If I know I only have a couple of hours in my day that are designated for writing, I can easily fill them with smaller writing tasks like revisions, or submissions, or blogging, or marketing/political writing, or editing/reviewing work for others. And while all of these are important in my writing life, focusing all my attention on them can mean never getting to the next big project, especially if I convince myself that to tackle something larger, I need more mental bandwidth and bigger chunks of time. Yet a day like today, when I have a lot of open time, feels like one of those expansive western landscapes I wrote about on my recent trip to California. They are undeniably gorgeous and awe-inspiring, but they also leave me unsettled.

Even when I am more engaged in my writing life, another way I sabotage my creativity is going for the “easy out” when working on a piece, because I’m often just trying to get it done rather than really examining its total potential of where it can go–in other words, taking the shortcut. This isn’t because I have any real time constraint. I can always come back to something the next day or the next week or the next month, and often do. However, it feels as unsettling as an open landscape or open day to leave things unfinished for too long.

True confessions: I’m three-quarters into this open day, and I’ve cheated. A lot. Instead of facing the bigger contours and potential of the blank page, I made a batch of granola and put up a pot of dried chickpeas to incorporate into dinner. And I did take a slow 30-minute flat walk with hiking poles, and spent about 45 minutes on some very easy gardening, neither of which compromised my knee. But though I kept my focus on smaller writing tasks, I’m grateful that in addition to sending out two poetry submissions, I stumbled on some new and useful insights that helped me revise a couple of poems I’ve been stuck on (and that I’d previously sabotaged myself with by thinking they were finished). And I wrote this blog, which means, at least, that I’m accepting and acknowledging the pattern. So while I still might be seduced by the ease of shortcuts, I’ll make a point of treading even more carefully through the minefield.

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Centering Home

Posted on June 21, 2023 by dinafried

Returning from vacation often brings me face-to-face with that moment when the world pricks hard enough to make me sit up and notice that I’m no longer in that carefully constructed bubble of paradise geared to distract me from my life. And this time felt harder than usual. The daily news, successfully willed to a microscopic wisp at the edge of my consciousness as I lay in a hammock overlooking the mountains of Kings Canyon National Park, started to burn at my skin again, its smoky haze penetrating the air like the remnants of a wildfire. And my to-do list, which I could easily reduce to a vague thought and make it sound almost pleasurable in my mind while walking through a grove of foggy sequoias, now felt gargantuan–a tottering avalanche ready to tumble at any moment and bury me in its angry cascade.

Usually I can counteract these post-vacation moments fairly quickly by pivoting back into routines, but for some reason, this time it took over a week to get my bearings. I just want to get back to my life, I kept telling myself, feeling more and more frustrated as the days slipped away but the tasks on my plate stayed constant–or grew. And that led me to question, What was this thing I was referring to as “my life?” What was it I was trying to get back to that wasn’t happening?

On each of those initial post-vacation days I was doing familiar things: walking or biking, gardening, cooking, catching up with friends I hadn’t spoken to or seen while away. And on the days I took the time to assess whether I’d enjoyed my day, I could clearly express gratitude for the many parts of it that pleased me. So what was missing?

Note: I did not put “writing” on the above list.

However, I was writing on many of those days. Mostly, I was pulling out half-finished poems and chewing on them, making a few tweaks, and putting them away again, not feeling very satisfied, or, more importantly, connected to what I was writing. And because I had such a long to-do list, it was easy to get up after a few minutes and do something else, before giving myself the chance to really revisit what I’d been writing and reset my creative clock.

And being disconnected from my writing made me feel disconnected from my life.

A week after returning from my vacation, I had a writing date with my friend, Lanette, which meant that for two whole hours I had to sit with her on the porch of Barstow’s Dairy Store (a great place to write, if you’re in western MA) and keep at it. I highly recommend writing dates with friends (either in-person or on Zoom) as a way of getting going. In addition to enjoying a brief visit before writing, I couldn’t just tweak a poem or two and then get up to succumb to the call of the unpaid bills or the weedy garden, because at the end of the session I knew we’d be reporting to each other on what we’d done and possibly sharing some of our work. Even as I flitted from poem to poem and took several breaks for Wordle and its Dordle and Quordle variants, not to mention checking email and social media, I kept coming back–until I could look at a poem and remember why I wrote it and why it might still matter. And that helped me finally make the shift back to my creative center.

Since then, I’ve been just as busy with tasks, social and family stuff, but I’m feeling totally differently about my life. I’m now connected to my words and my reason for writing them–even as I might continue to sift through and change them. And that means I’m home.

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Looking Up

Posted on June 14, 2023 by dinafried

I thought I would blog while I was vacation in California last week, but as Robert Burns said, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Not surprising. Even as I always bring my computer on excursions, as well as a notebook and pen and good intentions, I rarely write anything more than a few answers to emails that can’t wait when I’m away. But I do find myself doing some of the internal work that goes with the territory of writing, particularly in how I’m drawn to setting. The wide expanse of central California’s landscape with its sandy foothills, waterfalls, and high peaks evoked both the wonder and unease I often feel visiting the west. While it seems humanly impossible not to be awed by the desert wilderness and the open sky, as an east coast girl with firm roots in New York City’s concrete, I always feel a bit unhinged in all that open space. Ultimately, I want the closed in comfort of narrow paths hedged by trees.

California has trees. But not the same canopy that you’d find on the east coast, especially in the area I visited: Yosemite and Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks. It takes a certain kind of courage to hug one of those giant sequoias, even for an intrepid tree-hugger like me. Much easier to plant a soft kiss and whisper sweet nothings to a thin sliver birch than to try to slide your arm around the girth of a sequoia and realize just how small you are in the universe. “These trees are like dinosaurs,” my husband quipped. “They don’t even seem like trees as much as like prehistoric beings.”

Calling these notable groves the Land of the Giants was not overrated marketing hype. It took a full seventeen seconds to scan all the way up to the top of one of these beauties and back down again to our little corner of the planet.

And that got me to thinking–what does it mean to look up?. To take a step away from the comfortable landscapes of our lives into the unknown, a question that was enforced metaphorically by the intense fog we drove through to reach the park. Taking any creative risk is like driving through fog. We may not see the entire landscape of where we’re going in front of us; perhaps we can only see the vaguest contours, or a few inches of the road’s white line and a pair of headlights coming at us from the opposite direction, but we plod on ahead, focused only on what we can see, with the faith that if we keep going, the tops of the trees will slowly come into view.

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To Share or Not to Share

Posted on May 23, 2023 by dinafried

“You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.” ~ Ray Bradbury

Even when we’re not asking an entity from the great gods of publishing to judge and dissect our work to give us outside proof of its worthiness, when we share our writing, the stakes can be significant. In fact, when your best friend doesn’t like something you’ve written, it can feel much worse than a journal rejection. Because even when the people you love are trying to be diplomatic, you can usually sense their ambivalence in their tone, or the way they might hem and haw as they try to figure out a nice thing to say, or when they ask you an off-topic question that demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that they just didn’t get what your story or poem means to you (and what you think it should mean to them). Or they don’t know what to say so they focus on the grammar: Are you sure “its” shouldn’t have an apostrophe here?

So, what to do?

The urge to share what we write can be compelling. Sharing is what connects us. We write because we want to be heard, validated, acknowledged. While it’s a purely personal decision to decide when, with whom, and how to share, here are some suggestions to share in a way that both enhances and protects our vulnerability.

Be true to yourself about WHEN you want to share: There are many times I want to take myself and my writing to some snowy inn on top of a mountain and sit with it by a fireplace at a candlelit table for one. And this is a perfectly fine choice, whether you do it literally or metaphorically, especially for writing that still zings in its its newness and rawness. I find that I don’t necessarily need outside validation for every word that leaks out of my pen or pours out of my keyboarding fingers. Often the catharsis of dealing with a difficult emotional subject or finding the right words to capture a joyful moment, or a knotty character revelation can be its own reward.

Be discerning about WHO you share your writing with: Chances are, your soulmate in love and life will not be your best writing/sharing buddy (though I know some lucky few soulmate pairs that defy these odds). And words from your soulmate, your parent, your child, your best friend, all of whom know you too well and in too many other contexts carry much more weight than comments from people who know you less well, or those who know you only in a writing context. I could write a very long book that had nothing in it but annoying things people I love have said to me about my writing. And while I can’t ban all these stinging nettles from my memory, as I know I should, I do my best to consign unhelpful comments to their own little corner of my mental closet.

Be Clear About Exactly WHAT Feedback You Want: Especially with those you love–and even more so if they are not writers–ask them to tell you some things they liked about your writing–an image, a description, a funny moment. If you’re ready to hear their more constructive feedback, ask them to frame it as something they were confused about or didn’t understand, rather than giving you a prescriptive way of how to “fix it.” These can be helpful guidelines in a writing group, as well. However, if you are open to prescriptive suggestions, especially from other writers who likely have more experience than your friend-set in solving writing issues, be sure to consider any suggestions as a possible exploration that can get you closer to your own path, rather than as a “must do.”

Happy sharing!

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Babies, Blessings, and the Bird’s Eye View

Posted on May 10, 2023 by dinafried

For the past five days I’ve been living with my daughter, helping to take care of seven-month-old Baby Manu while her husband is away. Like most of life, there have been moments of joy, moments of challenge, moments of laughter, drudgery, frustration, profound peacefulness, you-name-it. The only thing certain about life with a baby is that there’s rarely a dull moment.

As a grandparent I feel blessed by having a lot more perspective than I had when my own children were young. In my years of early motherhood, whenever my kids screamed, I worried that not addressing on some immediate need they were expressing would scar them for life, the fog of sleep-deprivation only adding to my anxiety. Now, as I carry Baby Manu around the house and try with my old arms to satisfy his need for incessant “jumping” (i.e. lifting him up and down as he flexes his leg muscles as a launching point on my lap) I feel wiser and calmer–even when he’s screaming. And I’ve thought about how like writing, taking care of a baby is really just an exercise in plunging in and dealing with a lot of trial and error as I try to find that “true north” point of connection.

With Manu this might mean reading a book and taking stops between each page for jumping breaks, or tango dancing around the house while humming riffs from Raffi’s greatest hits or rap songs I’m making up on the spot–all on the theme of Manu: The Life. It might mean playing hand games, or making funny noises, or going through an entire array of animal sounds. Or taking a moment to put him down to play by himself, recognizing in my new found older-age wisdom that both of us could use a little time to chill. “Little” is the defining word here. All of these activities have proven successful–but generally none of them work for more than 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

The writing process can sometimes feel similar. While I welcome the blessings of the time I feel “in the groove,” other times my words–and my brain–can feel jumpy and fragmented. These are the days I go into the garden to chill, just as I put Manu under his playstation, so he can shake his rattles and babble to himself without Grandma’s interference. And other times, when I’m struggling with trying to write that “one true sentence,” I realize I need to switch up the activity, which for me usually means putting a story aside to revise a poem, or putting the poem aside to work on another poem, or another story or essay until I find something I’m connected to enough in that moment to “re-see.”

But I’m counting my blessings and taking the “birds-eye view” as both a grandparent and a writer. Eventually Manu will grow old enough to tell me what he wants–and so, I hope, will my baby poems and prose in progress.

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