Naming

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said "Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

Yesterday was not a good day.

Today has to be much better.

I don't care to remember or recall the rottenness of Sunday. The highlight was a walk I took in the cool morning around 10:00 am. I have the luxury of living near a park and so to clear my mind I took a walk.

It was one of those bleak days where there isn't an ounce of sunlight and you feel that the bleakness pierces you deep..to the utter depths of your soul. That the darkness clouds in on your brain and you can seldom do anything but feel terrible.

So I walked and walked and walked...I pushed myself to a near run walking as fast as I could possibly go. I wanted to scream and run, I felt compelled to let it all out, all that I was carrying deep inside of me, to fling back the doors of my troubles and watch them fly away.

I ran until I couldn't possibly take another step.

And, I stopped.

In the dog park along the way there are two large pipes that a person can walk through if they stoop. A man stood at the far end of a pipe and called "Maggie" until a small dog stopped and looked at him from the other side. "MAAAGGGIE" he called louder, the dog stood with tail at attention just looking, her nose working furiously. "MAAAAAAAAAAGGIE" he yelled louder, his voice echoing on the concrete. She began to wag her tail slowly and, in a moment of recognition she barked and ran towards him through the pipe.

I'm angry, I feel that deep down inside of me. It is anger that catches in my throat. I enjoy the peace around me, but I am so full of anger and regret right now. It builds and builds until I feel it coming out, until like Maggie I finally realize who is calling for me. I just feel so angry inside and I long for a few days away from it, from myself. I am hoping by recognizing it, by naming it, that I am conquering or beginning to conquer it.

In the Queue

Well I've been off in the bliss of Alcott's Little Women. As I have about a hundred pages left I am wondering what I will read next.

Because Christmas is almost a month away and I need to save my pennies and not spend them on books, I ordered two titles through Inter-Library Loan (or ILL in the business). It is a wonderful service that most libraries offer. Say you wanted to read On Walking by Thoreau and your library didn't have it, well instead of buying it your library will send off to another library and get the book for you. Some libraries offer this service for free, some charge shipping one way. Usually less than $5.00.

Don't you love my little tangents?

I took the opportunity to order two books about writers that I know very little about. I am fascinated by biographies on writers. Call me old fashioned and terribly misguided but a novel is certainly enhanced in my opinion of you know a little about the author's life. I do try very hard to separate the dancer from the dance so to speak but in reality there are very few writers out there that can write a novel with absolutely no biographical details whatsoever in the work. And that is the view from my little hill overlooking the park and I'm sticking to it.

So what do I have in my queue for reading?



The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall

Three sisters who were all equally gifted in the arts. Two were educators, one was an artists in her own right. Sophia Peabody, the artist, married Nathaniel Hawthorne when she was 32 years old and went on to have three children. Elizabeth Peabody was an active member of the transcendentalist movement. She acted as business manager for The Dial magazine until it folded and offered substantial reforms in education.Mary also worked in education. I already find these women exciting and I can't wait to dip my toes in and learn more.



Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim by Meg McGavran Murray

Fuller is one of the most exciting writers that I have come across since Virginia Woolf. She was the muse, the intellectual giant amongst the heady transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. The first true feminist in American history, she had the audacity to start formal conversations with other educated women because they weren't allowed to do so in a formal sense. She was the editor of The Dial and was the first woman allowed to do research at Harvard. She published a book entitled Woman in the Nineteenth Century and was sent to Europe to write more. She scandalized herself by marrying a much younger Italian man and having a baby well into her thirties. On her way back to America, she died in a shipwreck of the coast of Fire Island. After her death the men who loved her including Emerson pulled together and pieced her life together in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. I believe I'll read this one first only because I find her life so extraordinary and fascinating.

I am enjoying a very quiet happy life right now. I read, I go to work, I take walks, I go to the gym, and I dream. I seem to have slipped into my own little world and I'm quite thankful for it. No stress, no drama just joy where I can find it and peace. I am so thankful for it, so pleasantly surprised at my calm and easy spirit.

An entry in which the author makes herself feel better...

I was in an absolutely terrible mood yesterday. I walked around grumpy and confrontational. I walked around with a chip on my shoulder, with anger boiling deep inside of me. I tried to pick a fight with my sister for no reason whatsoever.

I was mad as hell.

For no reason really, other than a pure desire to be angry.


Self-pity is really a loathsome experience. At first you feel a bit low and you begin to take stock of your life and feel yourself go lower and lower and then you wish to grab anyone you can and take them with you.

On days like this when I begin to feel myself drop into the sink-hole of pity, I try very hard to bring myself out. Or, I avoid people. I sit in my room and read and listen to classical music.

Yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 and read about a hundred pages of Little Women. Alcott wrote Little Womenbetween 1867 and 1868. She wrote furiously on a little fold-down desk that her father built for her at Orchard House. What a remarkable life she lead, I am full of admiration for her! Did you know that she visited Paris all by herself, completely unchaperoned? Did you know that she nursed soldiers who were injured in the Civil War? She helped the doctor amputate limbs, she wrote letters home for dying soldiers, and she said she loved her work and even wrote a book about it.

I certainly can lay around and feel sorry for myself, I can wallow in self-pity, put my pity panties on, continue to carry this enormous chip around.

But what good would it do?

Nothing would be accomplished. I am absolutely tired of wasting my time feeling sorry, sad, and moping about. Pining is not allowed nor is pity..those are for people who have no direction to put their energies. I have a great deal many ideas floating about in my head that need to be committed to paper before they dissolve. I have a stack of books very thick beside my bed that need reading. I have Hamlet to prepare for next month. I have a lot of happy times ahead for the Holidays, my very own place to decorate. The thing is to crawl out of my head for a bit and live somewhere else, or until the grumpy monkey goes back into hiding.

I have the great luck of moderating two book discussion groups at my library. It is a joy to every month pick two books, read them, and then discuss them with a lovely assortment of people in my community.

But I'm quite pleased to have December off from my book discussion groups. I get to read whatever I want, whatever joy I choose. For December I'll be reading Hamlet as my Shakespeare play and other than that, I'm FREE!

I believe my first interests in the Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts started after I read Susan Cheever's juicy book American Bloomsbury. For those of you who find the idea of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as somewhat less enthralling and not at all exciting, I recommend this book. Cheever gets a lot of flack but I thought it was a totally readable and enjoyable glimpse into a community of great writers and thinkers that can often times be intellectually inflated to the point of being boring.

I am absolutely enthralled by the author that I am currently reading. She was a willful, intelligent woman who was driven to follow her own dreams in a time when women were barely allowed to be literate. She never married but spent her life writing and even experienced great commercial success from it. She was a nurse during the Civil War, a teacher, a seamstress, and governess. Poverty made it necessary for her to provide a living for herself (and her family). Later in life she became an active participant in the Women's Suffrage movement. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, MA.

Louisa May Alcott is obviously overlooked as an important writer when she is compared to her Concord neighbors. There is Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (who served as Alcott's teacher for a brief time), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. She's written off as an author of mere children's books, a commercial burp in the vast plain of intellectual thinking.

But I admire her a great deal. That's why I'm coming back to her writing after all these years and picking up Little Women. I started it yesterday with a hot bath because one should always start a new book with a hot bath. And read a great deal into the night. My eyes are a bit bleary and I made the coffee extra strong but my spirits are up and I'm content this morning to sit in the sunlit living room and read.

How about you, what are you reading?

Miranda: Do you love me?

Ferdinand: O heaven! O earth! Bear witness to this sound,
And crown what I confess with kind event,
If I speak true! If hollowly, invert
What best is boded me to mischief! I,
Beyond all limit of what else i' the world
Do love, prize, honour you.

The Tempest, Act III, Scene I


Maybe it was because Miranda was the only woman in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Maybe it was the repeated theme of dreams and waking from them. Maybe it was the magical island or Prospero's slaves.

Or maybe I just had enough of it all.

Two weeks ago I asked a question that I'd never bothered to ask:

Do you love me?

And B, sputtered into the phone.."well, well let's see...uhhh..I can't really uh answer that because well, I don't really know what that means."

"Its really quite simple, do you love me? Yes or no."


"No, I don't love you, I don't think I ever will."

Something clicked deep inside of me, like a window being opened or curtains parted to let the sunlight in. There was a great shift, an aligning of the planets. I was Prospero's Ariel, and his truth had set me free.

I took a week to really think about what I needed to do, this man didn't love me and I'd tried so hard for a long time to make him love me. I've been unhappy. I had exactly what I wanted and I wasn't pleased by any of it. I didn't cry, I didn't lose any sleep over it. I laughed and relaxed some, I was happy for a solid week of no contact with him. My stomach stopped aching and I stopped having headaches. I wrote a one act play that I loved and listened to a lot of music. I read poetry.

It was quite obvious that it was time to let go.

And so I did. I proposed a clean break; no contact whatsoever. It seemed harsh but when the well has been poisoned its time to drink from a new source. I told him that I would always love him and part of me would always be with him. I said I was ready to let go, that he needed to do the same. I said that if he cared any bit about me he'd just let me go.

And that's the last I've heard of him.

Last night I finished The Tempest. Miranda has her Ferdinand, Prospero has given up his magic, Ariel has been set free, and the Crew of the ship have awakened from their sleep.

And so have I.


We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero, Act IV, Scene I

On Reading

There is such a divine pleasure in reading. I can pick up a book in the house and very easily escape all that is weighing down on me. This morning instead of jumping out of bed and starting my day, I lay there for a while with a book in my hands, reading. You invest time with characters, with the prose, and the plot. There is nothing that you can control about a book, it has all been decided before you even pick it up. Instead you are at the mercy of two masters 1) the author and 2) the language. Whether you get it or not, you are for a time, a slave to a book.

Of course you can always put a book down in disgust or throw it across the room. You can give it away or trade it in at a used book store. Or, if you are like me it can simply sit on a shelf for years until you pick it up and it touches something immediate inside of you.

If I am going through a tough time emotionally, I simply need a cheap vacation out of my life; I pick up a book. Reading is the white knight that has very often delivered me from the clutches of that old dragon Reality. You should see my room, books everywhere in little piles. I feel the most accomplished in my life when I am almost finished with a book.

And, if you are a writer, reading eventually leads to writing something of your own. I read therefore I write, I see no other way. So when I am reading, I am refilling the well of my creativity. I work in a library, I write, most of my friends write in some way, I read..I've set up a very lovely life around books. I didn't realize that until yesterday and it made me proud that I'd not really ever compromised on something that I love.

Karma

Yesterday over dinner my mother, sister, brother and I started talking about the idea of karma. The conversation began when I uttered the phrase "no good deed goes undone." I couldn't remember if it was a good deed or a bad deed that went undone. Since I was raised Christian I still carry that notion that there is always a reckoning by a higher power when it comes to our actions. Karma really though isn't about punishment or reckoning. It is really about the cyclical nature of our actions whether good or bad. Karma isn't about punishment but about recognizing a responsibility for the energy that we put out into the universe

I have been thinking of karma a great deal today. Are we ever truly responsible for our actions? Is karma just a term that we've created to trick ourselves into thinking someone has to answer for the wrongs they've done us? If someone never realizes that they are "paying" for the bad energy they've created in the past, does it still work?

I think of this when I watch the news and I feel the world start to press down on me. Eventually we are all responsible for what sort of energy we do put into the world, whether we like it or not.