Quotable

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I found this in Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace: 

big tree“A human being is a part of the whole called the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of… consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” -Albert Einstein

I am also reading Martha Bergland’s A Farm under a Lake, and thinking about aging and its indignities, its necessary–and unnecessary–losses. I am attracted to this idea of striving to widen my circle of compassion. 

The Inner Life

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granma luskI have been thinking about my maternal grandmother. Arada Lusk (1895-1983) was a tiny woman with a huge presence in my childhood. I grew up in the house my mother was born in, and my grandparents lived next door, in a house built by their sons and sons-in-laws. The winter after my grandfather died, when I was 17, I often slept at my grandmother’s house to keep her company. I woke each morning to the sound of Elk Creek rushing by (only a few feet from the lower level), and found her sitting in her chair in the living room, reading her Bible and praying. Or dozing in her chair. She set out Corn Pops and half-n-half for me on the gray formica kitchen table. I caught the school bus with my cousins.

I view my own contemplative practices each morning in the same light as my Grandmother’s Bible and prayer. Joseph Campbell said, more or less, that a person who doesn’t have an hour each morning before television or radio or newspaper or social interactions, can’t have much of an inner life.

I read a little; I write in my journal. What do you do to stay in touch with your inner life?

 

Entrance…

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fall winter 2012 013I recently reread Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years. I hope I’m not revealing too much (about myself) by telling you that in this novel mother and wife Delia Grinstead acts on an impulse to walk away from her family. Eventually, she returns, and Tyler does an excellent job imagining both the humor and the tragedy of the situation. In a late chapter, Delia reflects that she hadn’t known her children would so entrance her. She doesn’t mean a doorway-type entrance, but the trance, the spell that our children cast on us. Delia has come to understand that the wonder she felt at her children’s birth was also a full-body — full-life?–invasion. She’s been under their spell ever since, and it’s a spell that (like all complex relationships) is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes…oppressive, scary, overwhelming.

This morning my husband generously cooked pancakes (his special cornmeal pancakes) for our girls and four of their friends. It was quite a scene, and all before Annie had to be whisked off to Bellingham to work at the church nursery there at 10:30, and then get resettled in her campus apartment. (I get to stay home and write.)

Anyway, this morning I’m thinking about things that entrance me, including my kids and their friends (and I loved having them here this morning, by the way).

What entrances you?

 

The Good Enough Writer

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When I first became a mom, my friend Karen gave me Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Good Enough Parent. The concept originated, I believe, with D. W. Winnicott. The heart of the theory is that trying too hard as a parent just mucks things up for the child. Better to be “good enough” and let the child take credit for some of her development.

I embraced the concept of the good-enough parent. Where I have difficulty letting go, is with my writing. But is my desire to make a text perfect, really just a a tactic to keep from ever having to let it go?

Sixty-seven drafts of a poem will eventually see me through to completion. The same sort of obsessive revising with the novel…this is not going so well.

One of my on-going goals (articulated for myself in the last few months) is to be the parent my daughters need at 20, 20, and 14 as they move toward independence. To stop babying them. Along the same lines, I need to very clearly set a goal to let go of my novel.