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I Won the Oregon Quarterly Essay Contest

I won the Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives essay contest.

I had to write that twice because I still can’t quite believe it.

Yesterday I received a very unusual phone call, especially in these days of ubiquitous electronic conversation.

“This is my favorite phone call of the year,” said the magazine’s editor. “You won the essay contest.”

In response, I said nothing. I was too shocked.

I’ve entered this annual literary contest maybe seven times and never even been a finalist. And I won! Hot damn.

My essay is titled “The Friday’s Trilogy” and it’s an excerpt from my book, Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, to be released this summer. It’s about one of the worst periods of my life, when I bottomed out in Portland 16 years ago.

Here’s what judge Debra Gwartney of Pacific University’s MFA program said:

"(I chose) The Friday's Trilogy, which I found to be fresh, alive, exciting and bold writing. I had some trouble following the first few sentences, but once I was in, I was in. A compelling piece of writing, heartbreaking and redemptive. Hard to pull off without being sappy, and yet she does."

“I’ll come back to earth soon,” I said to Guy Maynard at the end of our conversation.

“Well, don’t come back down too soon,” he said. “Moments like these are too few in our world.”

There will be a public reading of winning essays on the University of Oregon campus, May 4, 7 p.m.

Phoenix Rising

I suppose it’s about time to tell you all I got another book deal.

I know, huh?

Three weeks ago, I received an e-mail from an acquisitions editor at a press back east. He’d been searching for someone to write a travel guidebook about Oregon for one of their series. He came across my bio on the Willamette Writer’s website. Then he “followed me around the internet.” He read various essays and articles posted on my website, my Travel Oregon blog postings, and this blog. He thought I’d be perfect. He thought I was funny. He’d like to talk to me about offering me a contract.

I sat there in front of the screen for a long, stunned, surreal moment. Then I forwarded the e-mail to Capt. Daddy, adding a few excitable expletives. Capt. responded instantly and wisely—“call him.”

A week later I traded my signature on a contract for an advance. Now I have to write the book by Nov. 15. Not even kidding. But never mind about that. I’ve been writing professionally for ten years. Surely I can churn out 65,000 words in eight weeks. No problem.

The amazing part is that for years all I’ve been told is that to get a book deal, writers have to burn up the keyboard relentlessly pitching agents, chase after editors with finely-tuned elevator pitch in pocket, be willing to offer publishers one’s first-born child and grandma’s gold coins. I did all of that. For years. It didn’t work. (I even sacrificed the first-born child—ha, and ouch). But something must have worked. Because ten years into this little song-and-dance, two publishers in a year came to me.

Because of the tight turnaround on the travel book, both it and my memoir (about growing up in Oregon—how coincidental) will be out at the same time—next spring.

Far out.

This photo is of a painting my dear friend and fellow writer Suzanne Burns made for me three years ago, after I set fire to my first memoir and pretty much figured my dreams of publishing a book were dead. It’s been hanging in my office since, guiding me to places I couldn’t see coming. Suzanne saw what I couldn’t yet—with work and faith, something new would come along.

Someone suggested that with two books coming out, I should change the name of my blog. Nah. Lots more blooming to do. I might have to update my bio again, though. That book fire really is starting to feel like it harbored the Phoenix instead of defeat.

Yin and Yang at the Pet Store

Recently I took the chickens to the pet store. I envisioned a fun activity with which to fill a foggy February morning. I imagined the chicken’s delight at my suggestion of a goldfish to bring home—maybe two, if I were feeling particularly magnanimous. What a good mother I am, I secretly self-congratulated.

Chicken Noodle had other ideas.

Once we got there:

“I want a kitty!”

“How about a fish?”

“No, a kitty!” She leapt around in front of the kitten cages.

“But look at these pretty fishies, aren’t they wonderful?”

“I want a kitty, I want a kitty!”

I steeled myself for battle. Put on my calm reasonable voice. “Oh, baby, a kitty is a really big decision. I don’t think we’re going to choose a kitty right now.”

“I want a big decision, I want a big decision! Please, Mommy, can I have a big decision?”

How many times have I asked for something small and cuddly like a kitten and instead found myself in possession of something clawed and unwieldy like a big decision? Asked for autonomy, got responsibility? Asked for romance, got marriage? Asked for maturity, got wrinkles? Asked for a published book, got the job of writing and editing it?

At the moment, actually, I am kind of digging it. No, not the wrinkles. The book writing. It is prickly and unwieldy, that’s for sure. Not to mention speculative. But as once went a wise quote in an otherwise horrible movie, the name of which I’ve forgotten—“The hard thing and the right thing are usually the same thing.”

And you know what? I have learned so much already in the process of writing this book. Just this six-month project has made me a much better writer. I have learned a lot about myself, too. Who knew there was so much left to learn, ten years into this little writing career of mine?

A decade ago, I asked for something small and cuddly—the right to live as an artist, and forge my own path. And got something prickly and unwieldy—the right to live as an artist, and forge my own path.

Isn’t it beautiful?

But no, we did not get a kitten.

Happy Blogoversary To Me

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Bust out the champagne!

Oh. It's 6 am. Well. Coffee will do. Slip a little something in it, if you must.

Here’s a Blooming Year One redux.

First post: Popcorn

Blog Inspiration: Late Bloomers

Hero's Challenge, Act I: Consult

Foreshadowing: Free the French Fries

Plot Twist: Plot Twist

Hero's Challenge, Act II: A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Audience favorites:

The Lost Weekend

We’re Going to Potty Like It’s 2009

The Farm Share Blues

Torn Between Two Lovers

The Perspective Express

Roots and Flowers

Post That Best Describes My Glamorous Life: Baby You’re a Star

Post I Should Reread When I Get Bat-Shit Crazy: Onward Intrepid Writer

Blog words written: 31, 400

Visitors: 2533

Personal Take-Home: It’s been one heck of a year

Hero's Challenges, Act III: to come

With that, I’m out for ten days. Santa delivered (Santa Brings The Heat)—I board a plane for Hawaii tomorrow.

PS We’re dropping Chester off on the way. I'll take pictures.

PPS It might be time to change my bio blurb to the left. Book burning? What book burning?






Aloha!

Missing: Life Force. Please Return. Reward: Chestnuts Roasted on an Open Fire

This whole book thing is sucking the life force out of me.

I know, I know. It’s what I’ve always wanted and I should be able to find the joy in it and by complaining I sound like a big fat whiner and nobody likes a whiner.

Captain Daddy and I got mired in a teeny, weeny Marital Moment about this the other night. Here’s what I said, roughly, over a beer at the local pub:

The bottomless soul-searching necessary to unearth the history and truth that will make these essays good is like letting 100 angry leeches feast on me from the inside out.

Sacrificing organic creation for “sit down and create something beautiful about Topic X—now GO!” is like the Bataan Death March for the fragile artistic soul.

When I sit down to write, it hurts. Metaphorically, but also physically. Like someone is taking bites out of my head.

Half of what I write is complete crap anyway and ends up in the file on my computer I named “shitcan”.

At the end of the day I want to slip into a coma and sleep for like 17 million hours.

When the chickens run past me screaming naked with peanut butter smeared on their bodies and hitting each other with sharp objects all I can manage is to stare at them blankly as if they are a bad television show that I would turn off if only I could muster the energy to locate the remote.

And I am feeling, well, just a little bit done. As in DONE. But I can’t be DONE, because I am not done. And there’s something to be said for showing up and persevering, but sometimes maybe there is wisdom in knowing that one is just DONE.

At which point, Captain Daddy gave me a rather bored look which implied that he’s heard this all before, and perhaps I was overreacting just a tiny bit, as well as maybe whining in that particularly irritating “my pain is bigger than your pain will ever be” melodramatic self-pitying shortsighted way.

And he mentioned gently that part about this being my long-lusted-after dream. And that lots of things in life are hard work, especially things that are worthwhile.

Which made me pout.

But I know he’s right. (Don’t tell him, because he’ll just do that “I was right” happy dance and I’ll have to throw spitballs at him made of tinsel.)

Do you think I just need a break, and beautiful things will bubble back up to the surface? Or is my coma permanent? Yesterday I took a rest by addressing 125 Christmas cards and holiday shopping for three hours in a 14-degree snowstorm, but the answer to this question did not become immediately apparent.

Blooming Eventually, Repeatedly and Currently

The meeting with the publisher went very well. If all goes as discussed, my book will be on the shelves next fall.

It’s the strangest sensation.

Driving home, my brain was short circuiting. I have every reason to think that this is actually happening, after so many years of it not happening. I am going to publish a book. And yet…that moment is not quite here, not just yet. When does one actually bust out the champagne? When the book goes off to the printer? When it’s released? At the launch party? When it’s positively reviewed? Sells well? When the next book deal comes?

I said to my mother, “I just realized that there will never be one final moment of victory. Just incremental triumph.”

“Like life?” she said.

Which reminded me of a message a friend sent me a few weeks ago responding to this blog. Here’s part of it:

The way I look at it is that women are ready to bloom at any moment. We are not the annual flower that blooms once in a lifetime, whose beauty is awed but is fleeting and temporary. We are perennials - ready to bloom over and over with the proper amount of care (love, sun, etc!). It is the person who thinks they have bloomed once and it is over who begins to molder. Sometimes we are dormant, but the bloom is always in there waiting for the proper care to bloom again.

Now is a perfectly appropriate time for the champagne. Ahead lies more uncertainty and certainly more work, but it’s too easy to skip the small triumphs while waiting for the big ones. I’ve done enough of that in the last nine years. There is always something to celebrate, and I intend to start toasting. Care to join me?

Thanks to Jennifer for the comments.

We're Going to Potty Like it's 2009

Chicken Little is potty training. This means that I’ve been carrying pants and panties in size 2T in my purse everywhere I go, scanning new environments for bathrooms as a claustrophobe would scan for exits, and muttering “do you need to go potty?” in two minute intervals like a paranoid schizophrenic with bad childhood memories.

I have also been witnessed leaping in the air and shouting “hooray!” over a pile of poo and groping my child’s crotch a little bit too often. It’s a strange time, potty training—thrilling and a biohazard all at once.

Little is doing great. Even so, twice I have dismantled the car-seat (a task those who have tackled will recognize as a gigantic hassle), once pulling it actually dripping from the car. Eww.

After that episode, and before a three-hour drive during which I decided to take the bold Mommy-step of giving Little, who refused a diaper, the benefit of the doubt, we three girls made up a song.

To be delivered in a ghetto accent with a strong cadence, accentuated by rhythmic finger pointing:
Don’t go potty in your seat
In your seat
In your seat
Don’t go potty in your seat
Bad idea

Fun to sing, educational and another example of the new skills motherhood has forced upon me. I can now add songwriter beneath hairdresser and short-order cook on my resume.

Meanwhile, Noodle, feeling the limelight shift to her sister, is reacting with predictable attention-getting behavior. The other day she left a urine sample in a cup on the front porch for Captain Daddy—trying to prove (I can only imagine) that while her little sister can now pee in the potty, she herself has honed her skills to accurate aim at smaller vessels.

Captain Daddy didn’t rise to her bait. He stepped right over the cup and left it there. The neighbor discovered it later, inquiring of its origins when he came seeking my help with a bit of writing.

“Shall I test it for pregnancy?” he asked.

Dear God. A nod to stages to come (hopefully not for at least twenty years), and a reminder to enjoy the innocence of potty training, the simplicity of problems solved by simply dismantling a car-seat.

The Emphasis is on Eventually

“You hear what you need to hear, when you need it,” said Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author, at the Hawaii Writer’s Conference last weekend.

So much wisdom and advice was delivered at the conference. It was fabulous—better than I’d hoped. I absorbed as much information as I could, but the message that kept hitting home—the message I needed to hear—was about patience.

Nine years at this game and I am losing patience. The threat of a “real job” looms. I have two days a week to write if I’m lucky. I spent six years writing a book that will never be published. Rumors floated from the industry warn that if you don’t publish a book by the time you’re 40, you never will. An interested publisher just makes me worry that if I don’t give him something really soon he’ll forget about me or move on. Lately, I sit at my computer and feel pressured. I am losing patience.

But in Hawaii so many smart people reminded me that good writing doesn’t come in a hurry.

“Make haste slowly,” said Patricia Wood, who published her first book to wide acclaim in her 50s.

Michael Arndt, screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, spoke of the 10,000 hour rule of mastery described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (which I wrote about here in January—from Hawaii, no less—and then promptly forgot about: Thanks, Fred). It was true for him. Ten years of really hard work until he made it.

“Your job is to enjoy the process as much as possible,” said bestselling author Dan Millman, just to drive the point home that writing is a PROCESS.

Of course I knew all of this already, even if I sometimes wish it weren’t true. My best essays have taken months—even years—to write. It takes time for the good stuff to bubble to the top. It takes thinking and breathing and playing and changing. It takes living.

I am grateful to have been reminded of this now, with two good projects in the wings. I shouldn’t expect myself to create anything of substance in a big fat hurry, nor to settle for publishing anything that’s not slow-cooked to perfection.

Spin

I returned on Monday from a long weekend writing retreat to a kind-but-definitive email releasing me from the duties of one of my regular paid writing gigs. Nothing to do with my performance, etc., etc., it’s just that they found someone cheaper and more geographically convenient to do the work.

This sort of thing used to completely freak me out. I’d spin off into anxious hyperbole, convinced that this writing thing was never going to work out and I should give up now and get a job cleaning motel rooms or being someone’s secretary.

As is always the case, anxious hyperbole was a waste of time. Something new would always pop up.

That might happen this time. Or it might not. Ever since the first of the year, my clients have been evaporating.

But I refuse to I slit my wrists over it. Okay, so my income is starting to resemble that of a sweatshop worker in the Philippines. All right, so I just put the Chickens’ gymnastic classes on my credit card. But what’s money in the grand scheme of things (she says confidently, knowing full well that Captain Daddy will buy her toothpaste and wine)?

My goal is to remain calm and see this shift of fortune as an opportunity.

I have two big, potentially cool writing projects in the works (see A Puzzled Thanks and Plot Twist). Yes, these projects are speculative. Yes, I may never make a dime off of them. But by removing more remunerative projects from my path, the universe seems to be telling me to devote myself to my own stuff.

Or maybe it’s just the economy telling me it sucks. But I prefer to think it’s the universe, telling me that this slack time isn’t for whining, it’s for writing.

Plot Twist

As those of you following along know, I began writing a novel a couple of months ago. It’s my first attempt at fiction. The process started off with a gleeful bang (see A Puzzled Thanks), a phenomenon all the more personally delightful because of the fact that I was suffering through what seemed to be the death of hopes to publish a book of narrative non-fiction ever in this lifetime.

So I threw myself wholeheartedly into fiction; forgot all about essay, for the time being anyway. And what should happen? I came across a publisher who is interested in publishing a book of my essays.

I know! Can you believe it?

Two major thoughts about this fascinating turn of events, from a meta perspective. First, the universe has a funny way of handing over the goods as soon as the protagonist finally begins to work on letting go of her need to acquire them.

And secondly, words of wisdom from so many mentors over the years are absolutely true: keep writing. No matter if you can see where you are going, no matter if it looks as if you won’t ever get there, keep writing. Because: when ten years into your writing career you quite out of the blue happen across a publisher, and he just happens to ask you a question you thought you’d never hear, maybe something like “do you have a book-length collection of essays?”, you want to be darn skippy sure you can answer, “Heck yes I do.”

No guarantees on this one, I should note. I have a lot of work to do and it must please. But I am very hopeful. And no matter what, I will remember this moment as a big fat reminder that dreams should be stuck to, but never clung to. No matter which way the winds blow, you will be fine; but never stop working for the thing that will make you leap around in your very own kitchen.

I am quite certain I will complete that novel, by the way. The whole thing is there in my head just waiting to come out. But I shall be a bit distracted for a bit working on that which I’ve always loved: writing essays.

How's Your Self Control?

An experiment conducted in the 1960s by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel tested children’s ability to delay gratification. A child was left alone in a room with a plate of marshmallows, cookies and pretzels. She was told that she could either eat one treat right away or wait until after the adult left the room for a few minutes. When he returned, she could eat two.

Most kids snagged one the minute he was out of sight.

The interesting part of the study is that Mischel followed the kids after the initial experiment and found that those who had been able to delay gratification became the more successful adults. The “high delayers” were willing and able to invest the time and patience it takes to, say, get a PhD. (See The New Yorker article Don’t! by Jonah Lehrer)

I am infamous for my ability to delay gratification. If anyone would let me, I’d open my birthday presents the day after my birthday. I presume I was a high delaying child (mom?). I graduated sixth in my high school class, magna cum laude from college.

But at a certain point, I started to question what I was delaying for. Sure, I had the fortitude to get through law school, but did I want to be a lawyer? (An emphatic no). What had good-girl weekends in college to become magna cum laude earned me? When I hit the job-hunting streets after graduation, I found that the answer was the opportunity to rock the world with an $8.75/hour job working the night shift in a home for troubled girls (along with the four million other psychology grads, not a one of us whom was asked our class standing).

That’s the problem. Two marshmallows are only a great reward if you love marshmallows (I think they are yucky).

Instead of the starter job or grad school, I started waitressing. Waitressing is all about instant gratification. Work five hours and receive a fistful of cold hard cash and a free beer. It’s even fun. Imagine that.

But eventually my natural inclination kicked back in. Powerfully. Is there any career more dependent on delayed gratification that writing? After ten years in this business, I say no. You spend months or years writing, wait a possible eternity for someone to publish you, don’t get paid until they do. One recently published essay of mine took eight years to get published (Fame vs. Fortune). And we aren’t going to talk about my book right now, ok: we just aren’t (Book Burning Take Two).

Is it true, then, that the treat of publishing (maybe it’s the pretzel) is still worth it for me?

I can see my name on a book jacket and it looks far more fabulous than a law degree or 1000 marshmallows. But I am also increasingly aware that there is much more to living than succeeding.

And thank goodness for that.

A (Puzzled) Thanks

I fear speaking too soon.

And yet I’d like to report on my novel-writing project.

Four weeks. 13,500 words. 35 pages. Five chapters. And my dominant emotion? Bafflement. At how easy it feels.

I know enough by now to realize that initial creation is always the fun and easy part of writing. And I know that I am just beginning even that. Finishing will be work. Editing will no doubt suck, as editing always does. And selling it (should I get that far) will be Sisyphean.

But, nevertheless, I feel as if I am watching myself from a distance, thinking: wow, who knew she could do that?

Perhaps the root of my bafflement is that during the six years I spent writing my memoir it never occurred to me —never ever never once—that writing fiction might be easier than writing narrative non-fiction about my dead baby.

(Ahem, a friend responded. Yes, I would think it would be quite a bit easier.)

Who knows how this will all fall out in the end, but right now this is exactly the balm I needed to move forward as a human being and as a writer. And even if this is all it ever is, I’d like to offer up the teeniest and most sincere thank you to the heavens for that.

Zap!

When I was in my 20s I used to say, “I write when an essay strikes me” or “I have to wait until it’s all there, inside me, ready to come out.”

What luxury. Possibility and time were abundant then; pure, delicious creativity the only motivator.

If I’d continued waiting for an essay to strike me (what did I think they were, electrical storms?), I’d never have been hired back by any editor I’ve worked with in the last decade. Nor have written all that I have. In my experience, the muse does not usually choose to strike conveniently during naptime, when I have an hour to meet a deadline if I am lucky.

There’s a lot to be said for inspiration. It’s nice when you can get it. But there’s also a lot to be said for good old fashioned butt-in-chair hard work.

My youthful muse has been trumped by responsibility and sleep deprivation. But that’s okay. I’d like to find my new, grown-up, battered-but-better muse—less whimsical but wiser, who I can access more or less whenever I need her. I know she’s in here under my wrinkles and yogurt-smeared pajamas.

Can one conjure creativity at will? I think so. By paying attention all of the time, and really focusing some of the time, I believe that magic can happen without impetus of thunder and lightning.

How Many Words in Your Pocket?

Today at Blooming Eventually our subject is Ray Bradbury’s Writing Theory. Write three million words, he proclaims, and you automatically achieve mastery of the craft.

What does that look like? Let’s see if we can take a stab at how many words I have written.

Where to begin: Does school writing count? Let’s say that it doesn’t. We’ll start with writing I did just for me. So…a few essays in college at 1500 words each, many more in the decade after college; that brings us to maybe 50,000.

Next: the nine years I’ve written professionally, during which there have been another many essays for myself and for publication as well as a several hundred magazine and newspaper articles. We’ll say another 50,000 for essays and 400,000 for articles.

Do you think e-mail counts? Probably not: Even for freaks like me who are compelled to edit even the most innocuous email before sending. All of those angsty teenaged diaries? Who knows. Blogging? Probably counts, but I am fairly new at it: we’ll give me 15,000 words. Newsletters, annual reports, brochures, exhibit copy, web copy, ugh, blah, blah: 50,000.

Then there is that book I wrote. And rewrote. And rewrote. We’ll give it a probably-underestimated 100,000.

That’s it? My grand total life words tally comes to 665,000 words. Wow. Maybe I should have counted the diaries.

But that kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? I’ve been writing professionally for nine years and still am not even close to three million.

I’ll admit I could have employed more focus than I have. Distractions have included beach vacations, small screaming humans, The New Yorker and cream cheese yearning to be scraped out of the DVD player.

(As I write this: “Mom! Boo Boo peed in her pajamas! Mom! A spider! Mom! The head broke off my princess!).

Will I get there? Sure. Eventually. But for now, gotta go...(Mom! My goldfish got out!)

Unlike Ballet

I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell again: his first book, The Tipping Point. It’s an examination of the factors that kick off epidemics of disease, thought, trend, etc.

I am just not getting into it like I did Blink and Outliers.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the book. The copy is full of great anecdotes and facts. The concepts are well supported. It’s totally interesting and readable. It was a number one national bestseller, for crying out loud. And yet somehow it lacks a certain conversational magic.

It could be that the topic just isn’t as engaging to me. But I think it’s the voice—Gladwell’s less mature voice.

It’s not like he didn’t have bazillions of writing hours and credits under his belt by The Tipping Point—but by Blink and Outliers, Gladwell had bazillions more. His easy, winning voice had grown and solidified (making him his own anecdote for the 10,000 hour rule he describes in Outliers (see my previous post Thanks, Fred)).

Just reminds me that this writing thing is a huge time investment. And makes me think of something a brilliant friend once said: “Luckily writing is something you get better at as you age, unlike ballet.”

Bye Bye Mommy

One of the reasons I burnt up my book was that it was taking me away from my chickens.

It takes incredible focus to keep 225 pages in my head. One side effect is that everything else starts to feel like a frustrating distraction: Captain Daddy, my paid writing assignments, the laundry, my taxes and yes, even my own kids.

Every time I am pulled away from the manuscript (often) I am subject to creeping anxiety—fear that the whole thing will crumble into a million little pieces without constant vigil.

It’s a great Zen exercise, actually—working on staying present with the book and staying present with that which interrupts it: and, as always, not giving in to fear.

This edit is different than previous ones in a few ways, though, thankfully. I have a much clearer sense of the story—where I am going and what the end looks like. This makes single-mindedness more productive and less soul-battering.

I am also forgiving myself for being lost in my own head. If my undivided attention is diverted away from the chickens and Captain Daddy for a few weeks, so what? I suspect they will survive.

Namaste

After nine years with the same yoga instructor, I recently jumped ship. Not because of dissatisfaction—I love my longtime teacher—but because of reanalyzed cost-benefit ratio (popular in this economy, yes?).

Her class is offered once a week for $12/session and I found a place where I could go any of seven days a week for free. Even those of us in search of eternal serenity have a budget to consider.

After so long in one yoga-land, what’s another like?

It’s kicking my ass (perfectly compassionately, of course).

I leave new-yoga feeling physically and mentally pummeled. I have itty-bitty muscles in my back and ankles talking to me that have kept quiet for 38 years. As far as my mind goes—ka-boom! It needed this challenge something fierce.

This is one of those lessons that I must learn again and again—it is always valuable to try new things. Warrior III? There is a Warrior III? Half-moon pose extends to the floor? Why has this been kept from me? I might have gone my whole life without knowing that I can do balancing chair.

It’s been great to test my strength, find it completely adequate, and yet see oceans of growth potential. I am falling in love with yoga all over again.

Hear this, universe! By the end of summer, yoga will not kick my ass. I will kick its ass (perfectly compassionately, of course).

The Endless Race

One of my Anonymous Commenters likes to reply to my posts with poems (See “Guts”). I am not much of a poetry person, but I like her approach. Often her chosen poets speak better than I to whatever theme I aimed for.

Every now and then something really hits home. This one by Lucille Clifton, which I’ve excerpted here, matches my mood this week exactly.


we are running

running and time is clocking us.

oh pray that what we want is worth this running,

pray that what we’re running toward is what we want.


Is it just me, or does this poem feel uniquely female?

Thanks for sharing it, Mom. Err, I mean, Anonymous Commenter. ;-)

Me, Justified

“Explain yourself,” my step-father intoned from the driver’s seat as we traveled to the north shore of Oahu. “Justify your existence!”

He snickered wickedly. This is his idea of small talk.

JB is cursed with an existential preoccupation. He takes stock of life regularly—his and everyone else’s. What have we accomplished? What will we leave behind? And, after all that, are we happy? Have we learned to let go, figured out what matters, mastered a pitch-perfect balance of meaning, occupation and pleasure?

I have this same problem. That’s why we get along so well.

Of course he was only joking about me justifying my existence in a 25-minute car ride. Sort of.

He giggled with delight. “Well?”
--
The problem with hard work is that I’ve never felt like it was the only way to go.

I’ve done a lot of writing in the past decade but not 10,000 hours worth because I’ve filled half of those hours with other things—hiking and skiing and camping and reading a novel in the sunshine and learning to play the guitar and napping and loving and running and making money and raising babies and, finally last week, a little surfing.

I’ve never wanted to spend all of my life working, and I never have.

Perhaps at some point justifying my existence will mean learning not to apologize—not for unachieved successes, but for what was compromised for the sake of happiness.