Swimming to Shore

I lay on my bed for many hours yesterday. Flat on my back, staring at the ceiling when I wasn't playing Solitaire on my phone or carrying on on Facebook. I felt beyond drained. Spent. All used up. I felt filled with sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness later that night. I thought about my friends who spend days and weeks and months in hospitals with their children. I remembered the many days I spent in hospitals during the early years of Sophie's life and don't remember how I did it. My body bears the memory in muscle and sinew, brain synapse. I think of Sophie's brain and kindling, the cascade of spark. I think of doctors in earnest boxes and those that believe so earnestly in them. Again, sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness. I don't believe in the divine but am grateful for the divine comedy. Every thought spins another and the other is a gentle admonition that it's not that bad. There's perspective. There's Aleppo. There's my cousin in Mississippi who lost her beloved teenaged stepdaughter in a car accident on Tuesday morning. There's the very fact that I can lie on a bed for five hours staring at the ceiling, let sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness wash over me, the bed a boat bobbing.











Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning, and I am glad. I'm glad because his poetry and song has shaped my adult life. Even as my mind doesn't understand, my body -- muscle and sinew, bone, mouth, tongue -- does, and I am alive. I got up and out of the boat and swam to shore.



Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly through the sun
It's not aimed at anyone
It's just escaping on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing


Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

Hedgebrook, Day Seventeen

Andrew Wyeth-like scene of bird sanctuary
Deer Lagoon, Whidbey Island

The weather here is finally what I expected -- a gray blankety thing over the sky, enough nip in the air to build a fire in my little cottage stove. I'm going for a walk in the woods in a bit, up to a place called The Deep Dark Cedar Grove. The combination of piney woods and shadow and fairy tale wildlife with broad stretches of beach and blue herons and majestic snow-capped moutain backdrops to ocean is unlike any other landscape I've seen. The universe is abundant, and I'm grateful to be in it.

Last night, the new writers came. One of them is Sigrid Nunez, the novelist and former assistant, friend and roommate of the late Susan Sontag. Um, yes. Of course she didn't tell us that at dinner. I sat next to her and chatted politely with the new women. When one said her name was Sigrid, I said hello Ingrid and then she said, It's Sigrid and I said, Oh! I love that name, and the only one I know of is Sigrid Undset! We're a female group here at Hedgebrook, and we'd already discussed Pearl S. Buck and how she'd won the Nobel Prize. I was obsessed with Sigrid Undset in my twenties, read all of her books when I saw them languishing on a used bookstore shelf with the Nobel Prize sticker on them. What can I say? I have always been a nerdy girl, and a trilogy about medieval Norway was just up my alley. This Sigrid and I then spent a few minutes trying to recall the names of the few women who've won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and we only came up with six. I checked later, and there are actually thirteen. We talk about everything at the table, and not all of it is about Nobel prize winners. One of the writers, a young rising star poet, can sing all the verses to Beyonce songs, and one of the writers who left was a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and speechwriter for the Defense Secretary of the U.S. of A. Hedgebrook is truly the most unpretentious place on the literary planet. The ages of the writers since I've been here range from the 20s to the early 70s, and we are black, white, lesbian, straight, famous, probably will be famous and oh so not famous. That being said, I have allowed myself to feel extremely intimidated at times which is just another excuse to stop doing the work, the writing, and shake slugs out of shells and lie naked on the bed, an emperor with no clothes staring foolishly at the ceiling.

Anyway. It's Saturday, and the whole day of solitude stretches ahead, so here's the rest of the story.

This Sigrid also told us about where she was teaching in the fall, and that's when my tiny little mother mind™ began its inexorable pursuit of who IS this woman, she's SOMEONE. My recollection files have been moved back into the dark recesses of my brain, though. In any case, I went on a walk after dinner with my mind still whirring and wondering who the heck this Sigrid was. Was it Paul Auster's wife? No, that was Siri Hustvedt. You know the drill. Maybe it was the midges who swarmed me on my walk, diverted me while the brain did its work, but Nunez came to mind somewhere on the way home, a tendril that I grabbed that was attached to Susan Sontag and then all the rest. I'm glad that I didn't realize who it was when I was sitting next to her at the dinner table because I would have fallen right out of my chair. OK! I'm not saying anything else (I can be a bit of a literary star fucker). The tiny print is figurative, ya'll. 






The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.  
Oscar Wilde





Thank you for your kind comments over the last couple of weeks -- I have little time to be online, so I haven't responded to any of them, but I really appreciate them. I want to reassure all those braver souls than I that the moon slug or snail that plopped out of the shell the other day was dead, dead, dead, so I couldn't have sent it back into the ocean. I'm generally not a squeamish person, either, but I have my limits. I actually love spiders, though, so here's a poem:





A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman