“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” ~ Mary Oliver, How I Go to the Woods.
It started in the middle of summer with a pretty skein of yarn I had the itch to knit with and it ended with a soft and silky scarf to wear by late summer. I kept some notes and thought I’d share my simple “recipe” here, in case you’re looking for a similar scarf.
One skein of Sweet Skein O’Mine 100% silk boucle in the Oh Deer colourway. (300 meters/328 yards. 100 grams/3.5 oz.)
5.5 mm (US 9) circular knitting needle – 80 cm (32″) or longer.
Loosely cast on 12 stitches.
K2, KFB, knit to the last three stitches, KFB, K2.
Repeat this same row as many times as you feel like it. Then add one row of eyelets whenever you want to change it up:
K2, KFB, *YO, K2Tog*, KFB, K2 (Repeat from * to * across row.)
I had 226 stitches on the needles when I figured it was time to cast off and I had just enough yarn left to do it. Be sure to keep an eye on that because, depending on your tension, you may need to cast off sooner than I did.
Use a stretchy bind-off of your choice. There’s many helpful tutorials on Youtube. I used this simple one demonstrated by The Blue Mouse Knits.
Abbreviations:
KFB – (knit in the front and back of the same stitch) YO – (yarn over needle) K2Tog -(knit two stitches together).
Notes:
I placed a marker after the first K2 and one more before the last K2 to remind myself to increase.
Gauge isn’t important and it’s difficult to measure it over the boucle stitches. If you’re a tight knitter, you may want to go up a needle size for some extra drape.
The increases at the start and end of every row gives it an elongated crescent shape to wrap cozily around your neck. The approximate size of mine after blocking is 14″ wide by 70″ long.
Featherlight and airy! Perfect for anyone like me, who doesn’t like wearing a bulky scarf unless it’s below zero. The silk boucle yarn is a lovely texture to knit with. I’ve already started another one in a dreamy lavender. Wishing you a peaceful end of summer.
To feel closer to nature and the changing seasons, I highly recommend reading the poetry and prose of the late Mary Oliver.
“Maybe later today I will carve poetry into the riven bark of the weeping willow in the garden of my childhood home. I might go to the shore, smash my hurt on the rocks and watch my tears become the ocean. Perhaps I will sleep in the forest and wake to a world of talking animals. I might gather with others around a fire telling stories of seeds and bones buried deep – or fill ancient caves with laughter and song. Or I might just be here, quietly at my desk, sipping tea, waiting for the sun to rise. This is the writing life.” ~ Beth Kempton, The Way of the Fearless Writer: Ancient Eastern Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life
“New year, new you.” How many times have we heard that repeated since the start of the month? Soon enough it will fade to the background like an insect’s droning buzz– ignored until it’s finally gone. I stopped writing Morning Pages for several weeks. What became a habit for an impressively long time suddenly became a nuisance. And I’m okay with that. I think at some point most creative thinkers want to take a step back to focus on something other than a reason to create. Or at least the time and space to create other things without reason.
I set aside my writing and reading to revisit sketching, doodling, and dabbling in truly sublime metallic watercolour paints. I reconnected with my old friend knitting whenever the mood to play with yarn happened to strike. Creatives hear all the time that they must push through a lack of motivation to keep honing their craft, that a lack of motivation equals laziness. I used to believe it, but this current version of me disagrees. Then again, there’s no pressure in my current life to create for a living. I’m not supporting myself or a family with my writing and thank goodness because I would be terrible at it. Completely unreliable. I have deep respect for anyone who does so on a daily basis.
Drawing and painting is not the sort of creative outlet I’m particularly good at and knowing that provides the freedom I had as a child to dive right in. I’ve always loved playing with pencil crayons and crinkly paper and pretty stickers. Long before I knew I was a writer, I felt the urge to make things out of scraps without any kind of purpose other than the pleasure of holding those creations in my small hands. We somehow lose that feeling along the bumpy way, don’t we? Why wouldn’t we when we’re fed catchphrases like “new year, new you”?
Somewhere between the start of the year and today when I reopened my Morning Pages notebook, I decided the old me is doing just fine, thank you very much. The first sentence I wrote was well, hello, you, as though welcoming myself back to a comfortable room. Then I proceeded to handwrite two pages of jumbled thoughts. Sometimes hiding within a jumble of nonsensical sentences is the sliver of a story. Sometimes it’s just pure nonsense. Thinking about nonsense eventually made me look up the dictionary definition of the word. Here’s some synonyms: absurdity, babble, baloney, bunk, claptrap, craziness, drivel, folly, foolishness, gibberish, madness, mischief, rubbish, silliness and trash. Of all those words mischief is the clear standout. Nonsense equals mischief. Mischief equals fun.
In the process of creating something out of nothing the room can feel overly crowded at times. The walls need a moment to shift–to allow fragments to escape and others to remain. These are the quiet days when I walk with my head down to clear the space of what’s unnecessary. Other days I walk with my chin up to take notice of what’s happening around me. How the air smells like a fresh new season and the shadow on a boulder resembles the profile of my grandmother’s cameo brooch. How weak sunlight on the ocean tells a completely different tale in winter. This is how I know I’m slowly coming back to The Writer. The distinct feeling of imagining outside of myself. I have only to open my eyes a little wider and listen a little closer for the story to unfold.
First and foremost I’m a bookworm and as such I highly recommend the book I quoted from at the start. This is my third time reading it and I think any kind of creative person, not just writers, will discover something profoundly beneficial to take forward into a new year. Chapter One, titled “Quietening”, begins with this Japanese Proverb, “When embarking on a great project, start where you are with something small.”
“No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” ~ Julia Cameron from The Artist’s Way
Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity was recommended to me by a writer friend when it was first published in the early nineties. At the time she had teenagers and I had toddlers and I remember thinking, I barely have a thought that’s my own! How can I possibly fill three notebook pages every morning with whatever is going on inside my head? But I’ve always liked a challenge and I wanted to be more creative and less task-driven, so I borrowed my friend’s well-used copy of the book. Essentially it gives you exercises and a long pep talk to help you overcome the beliefs and fears that can inhibit the process in whatever creative medium you’re pursuing. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? I gave it my best shot for about a week, until the pages began to fill up with to-do lists and doodles, Dear Diary-like entries, and maybe a rant or two. It was the right book, it just wasn’t the right time for me to fully engage with it. When the thirtieth anniversary edition of this same book recently found its way back into my hands, I casually flipped it open to read the inside flap and the first sentence I read is the one that’s quoted above. Then I thought, I need this right now.
So I read it, cover to cover this time. And I quickly learned that I don’t need to explore every aspect of it. I don’t need to do every exercise and keep consistent creative check-ins. What I have been trying to do, though, is write daily Morning Pages. Julia Cameron capitalizes the two words throughout the book to stress their importance, I suspect, and now I find myself doing the same with a kind of reverence for the practice because I’m seeing positive results. What are Morning Pages? Here’s some quotes about that from from the book: “Three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness…These daily morning meanderings aren’t meant to be art or even writing…They might also be called a brain drain.” In more modern phrasing, it’s basically a brain dump. A way to clear the mess on the floor to get to the comfy furniture. I’ll be honest, I rarely fill three pages. Usually two, sometimes less. I don’t force the process, or at least I haven’t so far. Writing is hard enough without adding the pressure to perform on command.
In the beginning I wondered why longhand writing and not a keyboard now that we live fully in a digital world and not suspended in 1992. Here’s what I think: a written sentence can’t be deleted. Sure, it can have a line drawn through it or if in pencil erased almost invisibly from the page. Just the process of putting a line through a sentence or a word made me rethink wanting to get rid of it in the first place. It might be important, I considered, maybe even the truth of the matter. According to Julia, “Morning Pages get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor’s babble we find our own quiet centre.” Something else occurred to me. What if one morning happens to be particularly busy? Should I write Night Pages instead? Once I became fully engaged in the routine, I realized mornings offer the freshest insights and I should probably get up a half an hour earlier to stick with the program. By nighttime our weary thoughts have become clouded by the day’s experiences and the many injustices of the world. The morning is full of creative possibilities waiting to unfold. The following paragraph is the uncensored ramblings I wrote in my notebook on the first morning.
“I tried reading The Artist’s Way when the book first came out thirty years ago. I was writing a lot then. So many ideas kept coming at me from all directions and I needed advice on how to organize them all. Not as many ideas come as easily to me these days, and here I am again, a little lost, looking for some kind of direction. A similar scenario, only this time, thirty years later, I have more time and energy to focus on writing. My younger self had very little time to sit alone with deeper thoughts and imaginings. I was raising a family, working, keeping up the house, and worrying about the diminishing health of ageing parents. I used those precious snippets of writing time wisely and efficiently. I scribbled ideas and dialogue on wrinkled grocery lists and old receipts. I was focused whenever and wherever inspiration struck. In those days I had to get ideas written somewhere before they left my mind for good. There was no other choice; get it down or forget about it. I have decided what I lack at the moment is the creative discipline I had at thirty, and again more recently when I wrote a novel in just a little over a year’s time. Discipline yourself. Just get the words down, even if they’re garbage. Somehow it feels more important than ever to sort out the direction I want to go. After pouring myself into that more recent novel, I realize now, with time and distance from the work, that I repeated many of the same mistakes I’ve made in the past when it comes to trying to get my stories published. I know what those mistakes are and I’ve allowed the Censor to block future work because of them. So here goes. Day one of Morning Pages. Let’s see what I have to tell myself. I hope it makes some sense.”
Whoa. That is a lot of rambling to process. While The Artist’s Way encourages you not to reread your stream-of-consciousness thoughts, I don’t see the point of a brain dump if you don’t do some careful excavating of it later on. So what is my main takeaway here? Well, it’s not a coincidence that I lost the drive to write around the same time the agent rejections came in. But is it really a rejection when you hear nothing back at all? It feels a lot like being ghosted before you’ve had the chance to meet someone in person. We used to call it being stood-up for a date. Current industry standards say to give the email query letter and first chapter submission about four to six weeks for consideration. If you hear nothing back within that time frame then assume it’s a no and feel free to submit elsewhere. Typically, literary agencies now receive thousands of fiction manuscript queries a week. One or two of those a month might pique interest and get a response–other than the automated received and thanks for submitting notification. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Or not. The odds are solidly stacked against writers long before we work up the nerve to press the email send button. To be fair, so far I’ve only submitted two agent queries over the span of several months before making the executive decision to give myself time to reevaluate the process. I know myself very well at this point in my life–both the person and the writer. It’s not the fear of rejection holding me back now, it’s the niggling feeling that something isn’t right. Maybe this isn’t the novel I am supposed to put out into the world. Maybe it’s a steppingstone to the writing I can be most proud of. I’ve already proven to myself that I can do it. I can start at the beginning and keep on going page after page until I finally type The End. And I can keep editing and rewriting this same book until I have nothing left to add and nothing more to say. But is that what I really want to do?
In the rom-com movie You’ve Got Mail, after Tom Hank’s big-box bookstore owner character gradually puts Meg Ryan’s small bookstore out of business, he pithily tells her, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Then Meg (aka Kathleen Kelly) famously informs him, “All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. And what’s so wrong with being personal anyway? Because whatever else anything is, it ought to begin with being personal.” I didn’t get back into writing all these many years later expecting to get published. I suddenly felt compelled to write again and so I did. I spent hours creating characters that I grew to care a great deal about along the bumpy road from points A to B. Now I feel protective over them and fret about how impersonally they’re being received. In real life when we walk into a room full of strangers we don’t expect to be instantly liked by everyone. I suppose we start off hopeful about finding a comfortable connection with a least one person of like mind. Realistically, there has to be some kind of personal interaction to decide whether we want to get to know somebody better or if we don’t. Silence just feels so impersonal to me. Like Kathleen said, it ought to begin with being personal. According to published authors and publishing insiders, you’re supposed to keep submitting query letters to dozens of agents at one time in the hope that a single reader might (fingers crossed) see a spark of something promising in chapter one and ask to see the entire manuscript. Honestly, it’s daunting right now for me to even think about doing that over and over. How do you put something like that out of your mind and push forward on a new project?
Which brings us back to the start of Morning Pages, and before that, how I spent most of this past summer. For a few months I stopped focusing on writing and editing and email queries, and instead reread many of the novels that inspired me to be a better writer, first as a child and then as a young adult. I read Victorian classics too, solely for the joy of reading beautifully written prose, while at the same time getting lost in familiar adventures with what feels like old, trusted friends. It seems to take me twice as long to read the classics compared to contemporary novels because I keep pausing to reabsorb meaningful phrases and dialogue. These are my comfort reads, the kind of dramatic, atmospheric novels that had me rushing through chores all summer like I used to when I was a kid, just to get back to the story again. It was the best thing I could have done for myself, this reconnection to the stories that inspired me as both a reader and a writer. The magical writing that continues to be a source of inspiration for me today. I’m a firm believer that everything falls in place once you’re ready to sit down with yourself enough times to be open to receive the message. So that’s what I’ve been doing most mornings now that autumn is here. I wake up a half hour earlier, make coffee, empty the dishwasher, and feed the dog. Then I open my Morning Pages notebook and sit down quietly with myself until light finds my office window to remind me the day ahead is already unfolding with new possibilities.
“Improve your own writing by reading the work of people you admire.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I’ve been on a reading binge lately. This tends to happen more in the summer when it’s light enough to relax on the porch with a book after dinner. Lately I’ve had the urge to revisit both contemporary and classic novels I read a long time ago. Not sure why exactly, though I’ve been doing the same thing with music so maybe it all comes down to age and nostalgia. A couple of weeks ago, I came across Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity while browsing the shelves of the same bookstore I used to work at when this book was released in the mid-nineties. I stocked the fiction shelves then and no doubt kept restocking this one at the height of its popularity. Nice that it’s still there.
The narrator Rob is thirty-five, a little older than me the first time I read it, and we had similar taste in music and I suppose we still do. Rob owns a failing record store in London, which reminds me why I never watched the movie version of the book. In the movie John Cusack owns a record store in Chicago. The main appeal of this novel for me is that the characters and setting are delightfully British. Rob’s longtime, live-in girlfriend Laura has just left him and he is both miserable and relieved about it until he begins to search a little deeper for the reasons why all of his relationships have failed so miserably. For once he can’t seem to find refuge from his problems in his huge record collection or by working in his store. Even his two offbeat employees and quirky customers have begun to infuriate him more than normal. The premise reminds me of Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill–the way Hugh’s character only stocked travel books and would grumpily chase out visitors who came in asking for popular fiction. Rob does the exact same thing if a customer has what he considers bad taste in music. Since High Fidelity (the novel) came before Notting Hill, is it safe to assume Hornby’s character Rob was the inspiration for Hugh Grant’s reserved bookstore character? Interesting…I hadn’t made that connection until now.
One day Rob takes a hard look around and notices this about his business, “The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted–this is what record shops should look like, and only Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat–and partly because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.”
Like Rob, I’m not a fan of Phil’s band Genesis, so this paragraph made me chuckle and it probably did in the nineties, too. It also effectively shows us that the state of Rob’s store mirrors the current state of his mind. While he tries to sort out the reasons why Laura suddenly dumped him by visiting former girlfriends who did the same to him over the years, he meets a free-spirited, female American recording artist, who’s just moved to his neighbourhood and performs often at the local pub. In my imagination I kept picturing the character of Marie as a young Joni Mitchell. I wanted much more of Marie’s background story! What about her romantic hopes and music dreams? Why doesn’t any of that matter when her character is pivotal to the plot? Anyway, Rob and Marie begin a casual relationship, and while it seems it’s what Rob has always wanted–no strings, no commitments–he soon realizes that the things his ex-girlfriend Laura wants (marriage, kids, stability, soft rock music, etc.) aren’t quite so terrifying to him anymore. Can he get Laura back or is it already too late? (No ending spoilers here.)
Rereading this book was a different, more thoughtful experience. Rob’s snarky attitude and self-absorption certainly irritated me now, although I found myself laughing all over again at his sarcastic observations about pop culture and some of the music that came out of the eighties and nineties. I still admire the way Nick Hornby wrote this book–with unflinching, biting honesty. He doesn’t turn Rob into a likeable guy as the character searches for deeper self-awareness. He keeps Rob grumpy, neurotic, and reluctant to change. I still rooted for him, though, because change at every stage in life is hard. I like to think even Rob in his later years would find his younger self irritating and sometimes cringy. Like reading a stream of consciousness page in an old tattered diary penned a lifetime ago. Before we discover we’re not the centre of the universe.
It feels like a mellow Joni Mitchell kind of afternoon as I write this post. I’m not sure if Rob the record store owner would chase me out for asking for this amazing album, but I wouldn’t hesitate to debate him (or anyone) about the genius of Joni’s songwriting. That’s the beauty of the albums we treasure, each song is a marker tucked between the pages of some of our fondest memories.
Rob asks us this, “Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.”
I don’t often read fantasy novels, so I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the author lives in my neck of the woods, on Vancouver Island.
It’s a cute, cozy fantasy about a young, introverted Cambridge professor named Emily Wilde, who embarks on her toughest field work yet: collecting data during the harshest part of winter about the illusive faeries residing on a remote Scandinavian island. Emily is writing the world’s first encyclopedia of faerie lore. She’s a genius scholar, engrossed in her life’s work, and doesn’t have time to make friends with the quirky human townsfolk, who seem to have more secrets than the Hidden Ones themselves. With only her dog Shadow for companionship, she gets straight to work, fighting the frozen elements at every turn. Things are moving along fairly well until her handsome and mysterious academic rival arrives unexpectedly all the way from Cambridge to offer his assistance in her research.
Wendell Bambleby (love his name!) is the bane of Emily’s existence. She suspects he’s trying to ride the coattails of her hard work, since she already knows he’s lazy, yet insufferably likeable to everyone except her. It isn’t long before he’s charmed the townsfolk and at the same time muddled all of Emily’s research. Exactly who is this strange, enigmatic man and why is he determined to take care of her? This becomes the biggest mystery of all–will they remain scholarly rivals or is there something magical going on between them?
The pace was slow-going for me at first, but quickly picked up once Wendell arrived on the scene and the characters became more interesting and their witty banter entertaining. I didn’t know this is the start of an ongoing Emily Wilde series, which would explain why the pace was slow at first and the ending felt rushed. A light, whimsical story to read before bed. Now I’ll wait patiently for the second book.
I finished it last night, while my reading companion loudly snored. Will I have time to squeeze in one more book before the end of February? I decided to include this book review as a blog post rather than just as a sidebar link to my Goodreads account. Please let me know if you’d enjoy seeing Book Talk as a regular short feature here. I read a variety of fiction and nonfiction and always enjoy chatting about books.
We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” ~ From “Just Kids” by Patti Smith
I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” about an early time in her life during her relationship with famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a short book and I could probably read it in one sitting, but I’ve been taking my time because it’s one of those captivating stories that can’t be rushed. It wants to be pondered, with entire passages read and then reread. Their meeting is a chance encounter that happens shortly after Patti moves to New York in the late sixties to pursue her dream of being a poet and artist. These are the years before Patti became a singer-songwriter icon, a prelude to her fame. At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe was also a struggling artist and their different yet similar worlds collided one day when she was working in a shop and sold him a particular necklace she coveted for herself. When I wrapped it and handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.”
Patti and Robert lived together on and off for several years. They were the definition of starving artists, working at low-paying jobs to survive, while fearlessly creating their art during a turbulent time when art, music and politics were at war with each other and sometimes free thinkers were violently assassinated. For a brief time, the two of them found a home at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, where they formed friendships with other artists, poets, actors, musicians, writers and the many lost souls living there. Some residents were already well-known by the late sixties and early seventies, some died while chasing their dreams from the rooms of that hotel, and others, like Patti and Robert, became famous later on.
Ironically, their individual successes were reached by way of the very mediums they avoided at the time. Patti wanted to be a prolific poet, not a songwriter. It was others who encouraged her to perform, to sing the words she wrote in her notebooks. Robert created collages out of other people’s magazine photographs and claimed to not have the patience to take his own photos to depict his provocative art. Their love story was profound, tumultuous, often joyful, and also heartbreaking. We already know they didn’t stay together forever, but even over time and distance, they continued to support one another, calling each other their star, “the blue star of our destiny”. Early in the book Patti described Robert in one foreshadowing sentence: I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.
Patti & Robert at the Chelsea Hotel, NY – photo credit unknown
While Patti and Robert were in their early twenties, chasing their creative dreams in New York, I was a young Canadian child living in the suburbs, running around the neighbourhood with my friends, and also hiding myself in my bedroom for hours with stacks of library books. At the same time I scribbled my thoughts into composition notebooks that eventually formed my own long, rambling stories. “Just Kids” has brought me back to the beginning of my creativity. I didn’t take Patti’s starving artist route in my later writing years. I never really wanted for anything. I grew up comfortably, never going to bed hungry or feeling unloved or yearning to escape. But, like Patti Smith, I was a daydreamer and many times felt misunderstood. She said of herself, I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.
I was always somewhere else, too. My paternal grandmother taught me how to read long before I went to school by reading with me all the time. Early on I discovered how to lose myself in a story. We read storybooks together first and then children’s classic novels. Once we completed a book, she never asked me if I enjoyed the story. She always asked me how it made me feel. I didn’t know it at the time, but what a gift she gave me in that simple question. Thinking about that put me directly into the story and set the course on how I view writing today. I observe all art with feeling. I can’t listen to music without thinking about what the lyrics mean to the songwriter and to me. I can’t look at a painting and not wonder what the artist was going through emotionally at the time. I always look beyond the layers to somewhere deeper, somewhere else.
I feel fortunate to have grown up at a time, and in household, where books and movies, art and music were discussed at length. There wasn’t an outside world of knowledge for me to Google. My opinions and interpretations were always my own and I was often encouraged to share them. Patti and Robert’s story has made me long to relive the hours I spent discussing a novel with another bookworm friend over many cups of Red Rose Orange Pekoe tea. How one single observation made me reread chapters because I was convinced I’d missed something important. I feel nostalgic for long ago car rides, trying to decipher lyrics in a song on the radio because I’d always heard it one way, while another passenger heard something else. How many times have I sat in a car in the dark, shivering, as I discussed and dissected a movie just seen in a theatre with a sibling, a best friend or a boyfriend? Countless times. Wondrous times.
These days I–and maybe we–consume and don’t take the time to reflect before we move onto the next interesting thing. I’m reminded of my husband’s grandfather, who lived with us for a short time when we were first starting our lives together. He’d yell upstairs to me from his downstairs suite whenever his failing memory couldn’t provide an answer he needed, usually from a book he read a long time ago. We shared a love of literature and poetry, and maybe we understood each other a little better than most. Kindred spirits. If we’re lucky, we get to meet a few of those over a lifetime. I’d always dig deep to try to remember whatever he was asking because there was no internet then, no external way of fact checking on the spot. I soon grew to understand he wasn’t really searching for an easy answer, anyway. He was looking to relive the experience, the feeling a particular story once gave him. It was his way of asking me to come downstairs to talk about it with him without telling me that’s what he needed. Companionship. Understanding. A brief moment somewhere else.
As this year comes to an end, I once again find myself surrounded by stacks of books, notebooks, and manuscript pages. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I find myself here again. Back at the beginning, to the daydreamer I used to be. I rediscovered this year it’s an important part of me and I’ve been missing that key to myself. December feels like the perfect time to savour Patti’s words–her voice calling up from downstairs, reminding me to take more time to let my mind wander and ponder before moving onto the next interesting thing.
It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all. ~ Patti Smith, “Just Kids”
A Roaring Good Yarn 