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.

To subscribe to this blog, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

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.

To subscribe, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

Dayeinu

Posted on April 12, 2023 by dinafried

In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artists’ Way. As my children are grown and I’ve been blessed with the luxury of retirement and the ability to structure my “Act III” life to center around creativity, the book doesn’t speak to me as much as it would to those who trying to pull off whatever tiny pieces of life they can from the morass of work and family demands to nurture their creative selves. Yet, I’ve found the process of “morning pages,” (brain-dumping three pages of long-hand uncensored meanderings before I get out of bed in the morning) useful. And I’ve been glad to discover that unloading my mind’s detritus in purposefully pedantic prose hasn’t seemed to affect my ability to write more creatively in other contexts, as I first feared it would. It actually can be liberating to write without worrying about creating flow or metaphor, a clear difference from other stream-of-consciousness prompt writing that I try to load up with gems I can later grow into poems.

I usually end my morning pages with an intention for the day. And while I know that an intention is simply a way of focusing on the day’s array of opportunities, rather than some set of goals I must meet or feel bad about myself for not meeting, the tightrope between goal and intention is a fine line to balance on. In the last few weeks, prepping for Passover (extensive cooking and curating a new Haggadah) along with trying to meet my self-imposed deadline of revising an old novel and submitting it to my publisher have made it difficult to get through my general daily list of writing/revising/submitting poetry or short fiction, playing the piano, taking a walk in the woods, doing a cardio or yoga tape, and meditating–creative and self-care activities that have become essential markers of my day.

Then there are all the other weekly to-dos to fit in: writing political calls-to-action and doing immigration justice work, editing/giving feedback on writing to others, spending time (in person or virtually) with friends I care about, cooking dinner, making sure the house doesn’t fall into utter chaos–and what I call admin: emails to answer, calls and texts to return, bills to pay. The list can be endless.

And, in the last six months, I’ve spent several afternoons each week putting all of this aside to babysit for my grandchild, Manu, which is the best thing of all. In fact, for this moment with Manu, I say what we say every year on Passover, Dayeinu: It would have been enough for us.

Julia Cameron talks about the importance of making dates with your inner artist that are geared solely for playing rather than to get projects done. And in my experience, there is nothing more purely playful as putting your whole self–heart and soul–into the space of a baby newly exploring the world.

So, today, even as I will still stress about being behind on deadlines, intentions, goals, whatever, I will try to remind myself–Dayeinu. Gratitude. It’s all good.

To subscribe, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

Into the Vortex

Posted on March 23, 2023 by dinafried

I changed some of the paintings in my bedroom a few weeks ago. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, this painting, by my late father-in-law Michihiro Yoshida, is the first thing to greet me.

I love the comfort of the deep blue, as well as the complementary blue/green, the side of the color palette that has always felt most soothing. And while I’ve had this painting in the house for years, I’ve never looked at it so closely and consistently until I moved it into the bedroom. In addition to taking it in on first waking, I gaze across at it when I’m meditating, and sometimes, when I feel like I’m foaming at the mouth in frustration because whatever I’m trying to write feels like a stuck and hopeless endeavor.

I just gaze into that blue vortex and breathe. The writing may or may not come, but at least I start feeling a little bit calmer. And eventually, as if I’m standing with my toes curled on the cold mossy edge of a pond surrounded by deep green trees, I’m ready to dive in.

The act of writing, especially when we give ourselves permission to speak our truths–whether real or fictionally dressed– is like entering a vortex, a place where we might lose control of the carefully constructed selves we’ve fabricated to present to the unsafe world. Writing is like the cave journey I took a couple of summers ago in Oregon–how we walked down, down, down, the light evaporating into nothing until we were in a place that was so dark, all we could do was hold on to the rope and trust as we continued to take careful steps on the wet stones. And even when we flicked on the flashlight to get our bearings, all we could see were the dimmest of boundaries.

That’s what writing is about: dimming the boundaries; entering the vortex.

And when/if we can do this, or even take a few small steps closer to this state, we can be rewarded, as this painting reminds us, with the whoosh of our words rising out of us like the funnel cloud of eggs bursting forth from the center.

To subscribe sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

Writing Retreats: Enforced or Otherwise

Posted on March 15, 2023 by dinafried

Last Sunday, I had a stuffy nose, and since an out-of-town friend was coming to stay with me, I decided to test for COVID, even though I’d had it a month ago. And WTF, my test was positive! I couldn’t believe it, so I took a second test. Positive again!

So for the past few days (taking isolation seriously in order to try not to give it to my husband) I’ve had an adventure in my room–my own personalized writing retreat.

I love my room, which is where I both sleep and write, and has its own attached bathroom. I usually spend a lot of time here, but somehow it’s different when I know I have to be here, when the rest of the house is off limits except for a few brief masked forays into the kitchen, accompanied by hand-wipes to sanitize everything I might touch.

It’s kind of like facing the terror of the blank page.

After all, there’s nothing here but me, my books, and my computer. And I can only distract myself for so long with email, social media, and Wordle before the real work calls: poems to revise, poems to submit, a knotty novel that needs to be smoothed out, the last round of edits on my short-story collection, this blogging project, posts for Rogan’s list–the Call to Action site I write for (check it out on substack), articles and mailings related to my immigration justice work. In terms of COVID, I feel absolutely fine–healthy enough to write all day.

If only I could.

I’ve generally gotten a good jump start in the morning after a yoga or exercise tape and been able to write until my husband, the saint, brings lunch to the door. Then, a refreshing walk outside, a ritual I’m religious about that’s easy to do in a COVID compliant way in my unpopulated neighborhood. Hell, I even walked in yesterday’s Noreaster! It was, admittedly, unpleasant to forge through the wind with the soggy slush pouring down, but not as unpleasant as it would have been to stay inside all day. And I’m very much looking forward to going outside today when the sun is shining on the snow. The view from the window is already beckoning.

But after my walk, 9 times out of 10, the afternoon doldrums hit, and I don’t want to write a word.

Many people love writing retreats. They feel they get their best work with the quiet and peace of a new environment and uninterrupted time. But I’ve avoided them because to me a retreat means extra pressure on myself to produce. And when I’m in a new environment, I’m drawn to exploring it, rather than sitting somewhere and writing all day. If I’m going to go to Guatemala, I want to spend all my time seeing Guatemala, not a lined page in a notebook or a computer screen.

And, as I’m learning, I can’t even write all day in my very familiar bedroom.

But that’s just how I’m wired. If you’re one of those people who thrives from being creative in a place that’s free of daily household stress and chores, go for the retreat. I’d just advise being gentle with yourself on how much you get done.

And if you’re like me, or you can’t afford the luxury of a retreat right now, trust that there are other ways to get into your groove. We can delude ourselves by saying things like “I can’t write unless I have …. things you might not ever have like a cottage by the sea, a week in the woods with a bottle of whiskey, four straight hours of uninterrupted time, etc.

And then you might never write.

It might take a while to figure out how to create optimal writing space with what you do have. And this is going to be different for everyone. I’m looking forward to exploring some ideas in another post, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your comments on what writing conditions work for you.