Patrice Vecchione says to write with your heart, write with your eyes, and write with your life wide open.
What am I looking for within this writing life? To be open is to change, to not be static, to ask what if, and let’s see, maybe include curiosity and exploration, and especially trust. The closed fist and the open hand, the relief of trust and the infinite possibilities that we, as we sit at our work, will uncover truth.
We are open, free, but not always able to speak about life as we feel it, but we mostly choose not to. So take my words, these words as strong as my mind. I would use my words to write near and far. In Galway the bird stands for all things and Saint Francis and the sea.
1. At the center of my life is my work, the calm within the urge to create. Everything revolves around it. It is how I define myself, how I see myself. I was one of those children who failed miserably at school, I learned late and I learned slow. As if in a fog. Reading outwitted me until the end of third grade. I can still remember the day I learned to read.
The overwhelming feeling I am left with at school was that I was hopelessly sad. But at the center of my life was the quest to explore distant vistas, discover secret valleys that led me up to the mountain passes where euphoria sleeps. John Denver called it Rocky Mountain high, but, for me, it was every mountain pass.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion or a lack of oxygen, but where I feel most alive is when I am in the mountains. My knees know their relative age, so hiking is now problematic. There was a time when I hiked all the fireroads of West Marin road and the sky was the limit.
And I feel that I am not writing what I should be writing about—par for the course. Sometimes writing is a shield and when I crow about my accomplishments, I feel guilty, I am so used to being slapped down. Is it a Catholic thing? Pride goeth before the fall? Or has it more to do with not tempting fate? Not tempting the devil to eke out his revenge on your success. Not tempting the furies to take it back a few more millennia.
2. My life is surrounded by texture and color, things I treasure, a tribal rug from Afghanistan that no one wanted because it still carried the dark odor of the village where it was made, it carried the poverty and the odor of goats and smoke and cooking oil.
I imagine the woman who wove it during the weeks and months of solitude. A rug made before the modern age. Was the pattern disrupted by war? You can see when she lost track of the warp and the passion. She let it go. And I found it. I picked up the threads of her life and wove her story into the warp and weft of my loom of words.
When I brought the rug home, my car smelled like a herd of goats, I took a wet cloth drenched with Castile soap, and scrubbed both sides of the rug. I left the sun and the wind to work their magic. When the rug was dry, I took handfuls of, rosemary and lavender from the garden, and rubbed the essential oils into the pile. I rubbed both sides of the rug until the herbs began to work their magic. That was nearly 20 years ago, and still at the rug graces my floor. My feet know the patterns by heart.
My life is surrounded by rich dark colors—no pastels for me. What moves me is indigo and cerise, cerulean and sienna, but these are painterly names for colors. Color is visceral. I border on synesthesia when I think of color, and what suits my angst is color and light. I line my windowsill with crystals, so the prisms are like thought bubbles waiting to be deciphered.
Surrounded by windows and light, take the choice of yourself over what you think you should do. Frida Kahlo did not equivocate. She told the truth. When I visited her azul blue house in Coyacán, it was as if pieces of the sky had fallen at my feet.
As children we were taught that our values are at odds with the adult world. One piece of advice: I just shut down any assault. I went deep within to escape the without. I am always trying to push the boundaries of self, self-love, with a side order of self-hatred. Hold the toast.
How do I look for support, how do I see it, how can I imagine it? Good questions. Patrice says to question your assumptions, to ask what is true and what is not true—especially what we know to be true. I think of my life as a portmanteau of words.
Self-consciousness and doubt is someone else’s vision of your reality. It’s not real. It’s their vision, not yours. I said, I am too alone in this world, the ticking clock, I am too closed and I am alone with my crowded thoughts in an empty room.
I think of the long distance journey of the seed and the petals, when we are ready to open up, dividing the attention, disarming the shut down mode of censorship, getting to the heart of the matter. It is a chore to write authentically, I am reminded that the first flash is not always authentic.
Sometimes there’s pomp and circumstance. Or a desire to wow and please your audience. Call it pandering to the crowd. Call it wanting to be loved. Unequivocably. The craft comes later. Editing comes later, sometimes binding ourselves to the rational realm, which also paradoxically shuts the doors of possibility.
3. What I am ready to believe about myself, my life that I doubted before, or what do I want to open, a door, a window, a dream? The road to the south is long and ever-winding through the hills and valleys of my childhood.
Against all odds, I held onto the slender thread, a thought, creativity. Sometimes I succumbed to the pressures and practical pursuits of the everyday world, mostly encumbered with dire thoughts of survival—but that is a preamble, what do I really want? Now is all that there is.
Here I am approaching 70, I am more than a little freaked out by the concept, and during this time of Covid sequestration, I have actively pursued my visual art, something that I let go of when I was younger. It seems everyone was holding me back, or I perceived it as such. But maybe it was my own self-loathing holding me back all along with the voices of the oppressors merely figments of my imagination.
Where did I get the notion, for example, that I was homely and plain? When did I begin to doubt my beauty or my talent? When did I buckle under to the constructs of society, and why? Surely I could blame society, it’s an easy fix to also blame Catholicism. The general lack of value and worth of women in this culture, the misogyny runs deep. It is present at every level of self-awareness. It is a powerful monster that dictates and controls us. But let’s move past the past.
I always shelved things to be re-examined in the distant future. But that time is now. I was always saying when I get old I will go back and revisit the past. I thought that when I grow old, I would write and paint to my heart’s content. But it doesn’t work out that way. We are still the six-year-old self approaching 70. Oh my God, I never thought I’d ever live past 50, let alone 70. I have outlived my mother. But not her angst.
I was always looking back when I was looking forward. It was a very short walk to the center of the the end of the pier. The halfway mark where the horizon line keeps moving. My compulsion to create is daunting, with writing central to my core. The concrete evidence manifests itself in my blog that daily grows as I revisit the past.
Sometimes I transcribe old journal entries, recording the journeys taken, document the travelogues, and explore inner landscape of dream poems. When I let go of the past, not only does it expand my blog, everything goes into my blog, it is my memory bank, it clears the way for new ideas to arrive, all out of breath, and eager for the light. I welcome their arrival. These children I have been searching for all my life.
Finally I am able to paste together the past and record those thoughts I once scribed onto the page without the resulting angst. What surprises me most is that I am still that same person as I was in 1987 when John and I were in the Galapagos, swimming in water so pure and pristine, you could see the bottom like a mirror. But the burden of the pain is no longer there, and because of its absence, there is a wild freedom where I can enjoy the experiences of the past anew.
Patrice says to write a single story more than once, to let it in more than one way and and explore more than one experience. Think of something from the past, a poem, a story, a journal entry and revisit it from several angles. Writing a story multiple times change the he/she/they from a different perspective which also changes the speaker, changes the point of view, changes the point of you. Who is the teller changes the context, changes the perspective, and the context offers up a new vision. A new direction.
Changing the past tense to the future tense changes positions. Juxtaposition. Try offering a point of view from the perspective of the kitchen table, the cat, or the window. You have more information on tap than you think, and you know more than you think you know, and you know how to write a story three different ways.
What comes to mind is that even though it’s been more than 40 years since my last abortion, I am still not ready to go public about it, even though Roe v. Wade is really politically hot right now. I never expected it to raise its ugly head again. Are we having to go back into the past and fight for what we had gained so long ago, again and again and again? To begin again? I thought we had put this dragon to rest 50 years ago. But then, ERA has never been ratified. That should tell you everything you need to know.
I may never be ready to publicly divulge my abortions, or write about them in detail, and that’s OK too. It’s a bit like a massive confessional happening the world over as women step up to the plate and talk about their abortions. Something deep has shifted in our psyches and I don’t know what it will lead to.
I had three windows, three choices, and I had the knowledge that it was a choice between having a child, or my art, and control of my life. I chose my life over the urge to reproduce. I knew it was a deep-seated biological urge, and that it would eventually pass.
I asked myself each time, would I regret this decision when there would be no grandchildren to carry on my familial legacy. I did not want to pass my gene pool forward into the future having seen the ravages of addiction within my family. I do not think I was acting from fear, the what if… but from strength.
I witnessed my mother struggle with this very concept, to raise her children, or to be an artist, and the price paid was her insanity. And my grandmother lamenting that all the children she had took everything away from her so that there was never any time to herself. She always wanted to paint. Something I never knew.
My grandmother did not have the choice. She married late in life perhaps never expecting to marry at all. But the babies came like clockwork. She was 32 when the first boy came, then she was pregnant for eight long years, with a seven-year hiatus before the last one arrived, bitter and resentful.
That was not the life I wanted. Yes there was birth control, but it failed for so many of us. Three times it failed me. Number one was a missed birth control pill, doubled up too late, and number two was a diaphragm mishap— it had twisted inside of me, and I took it out, too soon, and number three was the foam diaphragm that failed. My body pushed it out while I was on the toilet. I shoved it back inside, thinking it would be fine with all that chemical burn. But it wasn’t.
4. She looked back at the choices she made, the children she returned to the void. Return to sender, she said, no such address because to address the possibility of a child knowing the dysfunctionality embedded in alcoholism and familial addiction was too great a risk—especially since her mother was bipolar.
Call it having a mother who was batshit crazy, and an absent father, overfond of chilled Seagram’s for breakfast, with too many DUIs to count. But he was an officer of the law so he skated. But not scot-free.
She did not let those small lives in, she chose not to be a mother, she chose to be an artist, it was an active decision. She was asked three times, and three times she said, no, and she gave them all back into the void. Small slippery fish. She never looked back. What was the point? What’s done is done—something her grandmother said, lifting her face to the light.
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