Letting Go, Part 2

Posted on by Maia

I remember being fascinated as a kid by the way babies would grab my finger and squeeze like crazy. Even when we outgrow the reflex, we continue to reach and grasp and cling. Yet part of growing up is learning to let go. Toys break, friendships fade or (if you’re in middle school) stunningly crash and burn, grownups baffle and disenchant. Most of us learn at some point that clinging – to people, experiences, things – brings suffering. But still it’s hard not to clutch. Especially in moments when the world seems to be spinning out of control.

Four days before July turned into August, I ended up in the ER with a crazy, stupid migraine that would not go away. They gave me a spinal tap, I suppose to rule out meningitis. The migraine abated after about 24 hours, but the headache that resulted from the spinal tap stayed another eight days. Apparently it takes your cerebral spinal fluid time to replenish itself and for some people this takes longer than others. And while your body restocks the CSF, if you try to raise your head or sit up, your head is flooded with pain. The only time I managed to be relatively comfortable was lying flat on the skinniest of pillows. I don’t like skinny pillows; I like fat, fluffy ones. All told, I lost two weeks of income and was in bed nearly as long, stalled in the middle of summer, getting restless and discouraged.

At some point, as I was harrying myself with money worries and work worries and book worries and relationship worries, it dawned on me that maybe I should use the experience as chance to practice letting go. Of worry about things I couldn’t control – the hospital bill I wouldn’t be able to pay, the writing time that was slipping away. I wondered if I could even let go of needing to be out of pain. I practiced breathing. I wanted to pitch a tantrum, what a friend dubbed his two-year-old daughter’s “toddler Medea” when she lies on the ground and shrieks and flaps her arms. I practiced not panicking. I watched myself move through these things.

There’s been a lot in the news this summer about rip currents in Lake Michigan. Close call rescues and several awful drownings. All through August, the height of rip current season, a little red triangle around an exclamation point has popped up on my weather page: rip current alert. Rip currents are fast: they’ve been clocked at up to eight feet per second – over five miles an hour – faster than Michael Phelps can swim. Most people who drown, do so because they panic and exhaust themselves trying to swim against the current to shore. What lifeguards advise instead is to swim parallel to shore until you’re free of the current and, if the current’s too strong for that, to float on your back until it abates. Then you can swim away and back to safety.

There are rip currents in our lives. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes it’s rip current season. So I’m heeding the lifeguards: there’s a time to swim and a time to float. That’s the lesson I’m trying to learn. To cultivate calm, to float till there’s a break in the current and then make my way back to the sand.

Letting Go, Part 1

Posted on by Maia

The last chapter in The Saltwater Twin (don’t hold your breath, friends, I’ve months to go yet) is going to be about letting go. It’s something I wish I were better at. It’s a little bit of a pickle, actually, because as a writer, it’s sort of my job to notice and hold and catalogue details, but as a human being who prefers to feel mostly happy and relatively untortured, I find letting go to be a useful skill. It’s something I keep having to learn, maybe the most important thing. As such, it seems like a fitting topic for the last chapter of a book that is something of a piecemeal memoir of my whole life so far.

It’s been a challenging month. (More on that in the next post.) This old song has been playing in my head. I couldn’t remember all the words, but I knew it was Irish; I thought The Clancy Brothers sang it. Yesterday I went online to find a version to download. Turns out “The Parting Glass” dates back to at least the 18th century, and The Clancy Brothers did often play it to end their concerts. There are different versions, of course, because it is an old, old song with, as it turns out, both Irish and Scottish roots, but here are a couple of the verses that are often sung:

Of all the money e’er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm I’ve ever done,
Alas! it was to none but me.
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all.

Oh, all the comrades e’er I had,
They’re sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts e’er I had,
They’d wish me one more day to stay,
But since it falls unto my lot,
That I should rise and you should not,
I gently rise and softly call,
Good night and joy be with you all.

Okay, so it makes sense why this song has been playing on the record player in my brain recently, since it’s about letting go – well, saying goodbye, anyway – for a short time or a long time or forever. The melody sounds sweet and old and wistful, like the song is trying to teach you how to let go gently before the last note fades. The Pogues did a rendition and The Wailin’ Jennys, The High Kings and, of course, The Clancy Brothers. I was listening to the latter when a thumbnail image in the margin caught my attention: “Bob Dylan: Thoughts on Liam Clancy.” I clicked. In the clip, Dylan tells a story about drinking pint after pint of Guinness with Clancy someplace in Greenwich Village when Clancy said to him, “Remember Bob, no fear, no envy, no meanness.”

Yes, I am now getting my life lessons from YouTube. Because that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. The best advice for writing and for life.

No fear. Yep. Fear suffocates. We are our best when we throw ourselves into our work wholeheartedly without worrying about the outcome. I, for example, don’t know what will happen when I finish this book. What if no one publishes it? No one reads it? What if I’m fooling myself that I have something worthwhile to say? There are a million what ifs. But I think I’m best, I’m smartest and happiest when I can let go of the fear that things won’t turn out the way I hope.

No envy. Yep. I’ve been reading a lot of essay and memoir while working on this book. The Saltwater Twin is a collection of personal essays, a new form for me. I want to get a sense of the ways it has been done, how best to assemble a collection of work, how to create a dynamic narrative arc from stories that felt random when they were happening, how to strike a satisfying balance between story and non-narrative (but hopefully still diverting) musings. Sometimes I envy the writers I’m reading. They’ve already published books. They already have fancy websites and checks from publishers and book signings with plastic cups of wine. That envy is a fruitless pursuit, and it leads, frequently, back to fear. Who am I to think I can do this thing?

No meanness. Ah. I like that meanness has multiple meanings. Meanness, as in unkindness, does not make good art. The voices that hiss “stupid” or “worthless” or “give up now” do not make me want to sit down and type. But neither does meanness as in stinginess. I can’t hold anything back. I want to give my whole self to the work – everything I have – and freely.  This goes for life, too, of course. You are a genius, Liam Clancy!

So, my lads and lasses, my comrades and sweethearts – letting go of fear, of envy, of meanness. Will you fill a glass and toast with me to that?

And Now, the Octopus

Posted on by Maia

I’m working on a chapter that’s based on a monologue I performed a few years ago at Live Bait Theater in Chicago. Every summer, my friend Tekki, the artistic director of Tellin’ Tales Theatre, curates an evening of solo performance based on a theme. That particular year she titled the show “Potholes on the Path to Enlightenment,” and she asked us to write about an epiphany. That’s not really so hard, I thought: almost every story is about some kind of discovery – some little or big a ha! But she wanted it to be something pretty major, something that could, like, change your life. When I started working on the piece, I became a little obsessed with octopuses. For weeks, I read and wrote about octopuses. (By the way, octopuses is the correct plural – either that or octopodes. Octopi is frowned on by most references because the –pus derives from Greek and not Latin.) I wrote about an octopus I remembered from Sesame Street, which I watched as a kid. A man’s voice said, “And now, the octopus,” then this octopus swam around a tank for a minute, and that was it. Anyway, I was trying to write this piece about epiphany; I thought I should be writing about God, transcendence, the search for meaning, and I kept coming back to the octopus.

Figuring out what my brain is onto is one of my favorite parts of writing. The work is making clear the dot-to-dot of connections I’ve made in my head and finding a way to take the reader along on the journey. I don’t want to make it all too obvious or the reading won’t be any fun. But I can’t make it too obscure either – I can’t lead the reader into the woods and leave them with no trail to find their way back. I want the reader to make the discoveries I made in the living and the writing of the story – in this piece, for example, how the search for God and meaning relates to octopuses (also Clash of the Titans and Esther Williams).

An epiphany is an insight that comes about because of something ordinary. I probably watched my octopus on Sesame Street every day. It was ordinary. But the octopus itself, all rippling flesh and unfurling suckers was extraordinary. The octopus was an epiphany billowing across our black and white TV.  It said, wake up! Look at what’s out here in the world. Look and look and look.

Tell me, friends. What is it that makes you wake up and look?

the courage of your lungs

Posted on by Maia

It’s June already. Summer is breathing down our necks. How did this happen? I’ve been working hard all spring, but teaching a full load of classes and workshops (oh, and trying not to be a hermit because that never ends well) has meant that I’ve only completed one 7,000 word chapter, “Law of the Jungle” over the past several weeks. But summer’s nearly here, and that makes me feel energized and alive and ready to run. I know just a few weeks ago I wrote a post “In Praise of Slowness,” but now I’m kind of in the mood to go fast. Not a teeth-gritted-when-is-this-hell-going-to-be-over kind of fast, but the kind when your body just begs you to run.

One afternoon this spring I asked the students in my after school program to write images that showed relationships. They wrote of grandmothers dancing at family reunions, a woman chasing a man and throwing her high heels at him, a father marveling over his infant son’s feet. One student wrote: Two girls running, the wind blowing their hair back.”

(If you want to, you can pretend you’re listening to the “Chariots of Fire” theme as you read the rest of this post.)

That’s the kind of running I mean – when your lungs ache and your legs get a mind of their own, running like a kid, running toward nothing. The goal is not the goal, you just open up and run like a smiling dog on the beach. So that is my summer plan. I have a goal in mind. It’s a big goal, a lot of chapters. But I’m going to set my mind on running for the joy of running and see how that works out.  And when my lungs ache I will remember running in my college town through fields of corn you could practically hear growing, wisps of clouds in the sky, worn pavement rising to meet my feet.  I’ll revel in my fleet feet, my capacity to move and breathe and feel the sun and wind on my skin.

This summer I’m running. Who’s in?

You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.

                                                                                                        – Jesse Owens

listen

Posted on by Maia

I’m working on “Law of the Jungle” which I’m thinking is going to be chapter three of The Saltwater Twin, and I feel like it’s taking forever. It’s one of those essays I’m pretty much figuring out as I go along. With chapters like this, I start out with a sense of the general direction, but the writing is investigative, exploratory, the terrain shifting. I’ll get an impulse to include some image or anecdote, then have to figure out why and how it’s connected to the other stuff I’ve put in. It’s like assembling a puzzle but first having to find the pieces; there’s a lot to sift through, and I have to ask each piece where it belongs and listen to what it says.

My mind is a noisy place sometimes…fine, almost all the time. Today, for example, it is saying that the cemetery I saw on my drive out to Palatine, IL to teach five workshops looks beautiful in the rain and also I love cemeteries and also I’m remembering certain magical cemeteries in Paris and New Orleans and walking through them when it was cold and when it was hot and my mind is saying remember, I have to get a cashier’s check to send in for my health insurance and should I get some vegan cake and also I need to do some fairy tale research for the Lyric Opera study guide maybe on Bettelheim and I’m recalling how my neighbor’s bitchy bunny sounded when he hissed at me when I put his salad in his cage and I didn’t even know bunnies hissed and my mind is also saying rain! I love the rain, also I need to get to the gym and why is it so hard and also I want to sleep and also what if after all this work this book never gets published, what then and also what do people eat on backpacking trips because I’m going backpacking for the first time ever in a few weeks? It’s like my brain is a concert hall where the orchestra is tuning up and the lady next to me is unwrapping candy and I’m in the middle of 360 degrees of conversations about workdays and affairs and trains, and amid the noise, I have to listen for the voice that is telling me the story of the thing I’m trying to write.

It helps to remember a quote I love from Martha Graham.  (Ever since I read it a few years back, I’ve pretty much plastered it all over the place, including my artist page at urbangateways.org, the non-profit that sent me out to do those Palatine workshops.) Graham says,

There is a vitality, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

First of all, I love the word and concept of “a quickening,” a coming into being, coming alive. Second, she’s so clear: your job is simply to translate your own voice.

I like it when the things I want or need to do to earn a living or achieve something I want to achieve are also the things I believe I need to learn to be a better human being. This lesson is about listening, getting still, paying attention to what matters in the moment. Trusting your voice to emerge. Those are good things to learn.

How do you pay attention to what matters? And what does your voice say in the stillness?