Hedgebrook, Day 13

Beet Soup, Couscous Salad with Vegetables and Plums
Lunch at Hedgebrook on the 13th day

Don't big apartment and office buildings skip the 13th floor, call it the 14th? Is this something done worldwide still or only in the apartment buildings of New York City? I think of elevator doors opening into emptiness, the charade of living on the 14th floor when it's really the 13th.

I think about chance, good fortune, what is deserved, what falls in your lap. I think about being mindful of each day as it comes, letting it open and entering it.

It's the 13th day of my writing residency at Hedgebrook. It's relevant to the elevator thing only as much as its assertion of superstititon's hold on us. Maybe I should just speak of me. I can't get enough of using just one bowl, one plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon, one water glass and one coffee cup for my breakfast and lunch here in Willow Cottage. I have a tiny square of sponge onto which I squirt one tiny drop of concentrated dish soap and wash each utensil and plate before placing it in the drying rack beside the sink. I have two vases that I fill with water every two days or so and some flowers that I've cut from the garden --  daisies, bold-faced rudebeckia, a purple coneflower, something from the onion family, a gawdy hollyhock. Each morning, I wake to silence and birds and each night I fall asleep to silence and frogs, the wind through the pines that stand calmly outside my cottage. Each day is an idyll of idleness and work. Radical hospitality received. Exquisite simplicity.

I  too much look forward to the next day which will be one less day. Today. I'm not skipping the 13th day. I'll live through it, not depend on the 14th to define it.

Hedgebrook, Day 12

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Virginia Woolf,  Orlando: A Biography

Hedgebrook, Day Eleven

Sunset last night over Deer Lagoon. The bugs are so dense that their noise is collective -- a terrifying hum that explains the word swarm.

Sunrise this morning from Hedgebrook Farm looking out toward Useless Bay and the moon. I go to bed very late, writing and then reading until 2 or 3 in the morning and then sleeping until 10 or even later. I dream every night or early morning, too, something that only happened sporadically for many years. My mind, I think, is free to range. This morning, I woke before 5 and decided to put shoes on and go outside for a walk around the farm. It was barely light. I want to see an owl. The woods were, in fact, lovely, dark and deep. When I reached the meadow, three deer lifted their heads and looked in my direction, walked into the woods. Birds and the distant, insistent crow of a rooster. No owl. Something in the bushes rustled. I was the only human awake. At my cottage I climbed into the loft and got into the bed, still warm despite the half hour that had passed since I'd left. I went back to sleep and yes, I dreamed of an owl.

Hedgebrook, Day 10

Windowseat in Willow Cottage, Hedgebrook

I startled at the sudden buzz of a fly, so deep I was in the writing. I've been killing flies all week, merciless and decidedly un-Buddhist. Where in the hell did that one come in? I thought. Had it slipped through a hole somewhere or been asleep and woken? Do flies sleep? It sounded frantic and beat against the glass of the window-seat. I opened the window a crack, and it made its way out.

Have you ever seen a bird climb a tree? I watched a small one make its way from the ground, up the pine outside the window, skittering up the bark, navigating the whorls and sappy spots and hopping in increments at a diagonal. When he reached a particularly large knot, though, he stopped and flew up to a branch where he perched in ease.

Happy Fourth of July. At risk of offending someone, I must admit that it's nice not to be waving a flag but to be deep in the greeny woods in the company of birds and bugs who know no country.

Hedgebrook, Day Nine

I only saw the moon last night because I turned my back and then turned back around. A pumpkin-colored disc floating just between the trees, close enough to touch except that I couldn't. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't turned.

Today I began the work of writing about Sophie's vaccination history. I push into the depths of the internet --pseudotumor cerebri and corticosteroids, pseudotumor cerebri and DT and polio vaccinations -- twenty years in, and it all comes back. How I didn't know a goddamn thing and neither did They. It's a chapter on control and there doesn't seem to be any way to, ironically, control the many arms of it. An octopus, eggplant purple, perverse, seductive, terrifying. The constant chirp of insect and throaty call of frog, the sunshine speckled pine tree outside my window, the raucous crow overhead, the solitude -- are they real? Is it opportunity to be so weakened by events outside of nature that you must find your strength in going back into it, or suicide  to do so?

My friend A suggested that I take James Baldwin's advice about fear:

Turn and walk into it.

Hedgebrook, Day Eight

Full moon over Deer Lagoon, Whidbey Island

the devourers of books, who exhaust themselves 
only by reading, should desist as soon as they find 
their comprehension more than commonly slow, 
their sight moaty and dimmish, or their eyes hot and watery.

Samuel Tissot, from his Essay on Diseases Incident to 
Literary and Sedentary Persons (1769)


Don't think I haven't felt chagrin, even guilt. I woke this morning and peered over the railing next to my bed, a loft that you reach by ladder. The sun slanted through the small, paned window over the kitchen sink and fell on the floor in a rainbow. Each part of the Hedgebrook cottage is perfect, perfect and sufficient to each moment. My mind might wander to the future, the end of my stay, finger the sore of re-entry, but the solitude here, the birds, the wildflowers gathered from the garden and placed in a jar on the windowsill, one plate, one bowl, one fork, one spoon, one cup to hold coffee conspire to keep me here, now.

Hedgebrook, Day Seven

I went to sleep last night too late, grateful to be done with A Little Life and immersed in Sally Mann's Hold Still.

I wrote for hours, filling in spots in my goddamn book (henceforth called MGDB) that called for something, anything. I remembered the early days of my life in the circus, the three-ringed one of the kids and me, Henry and Oliver and I on the trapeze, Sophie our Master of Ceremonies.

My true talent lies on the tightrope, though.

On my way back from the farmhouse last night where I'd returned after dinner to get two slices of toast for my breakfast, I made my way through the meadow (yes, farmhouse, meadow), sat on a bench and watched Mt. Rainier rise up through pink clouds, its snowy tip visible and then not. The wind blew through the grasses in front of me and was all I could hear.

Hedgebrook, Day Six

Fish tacos for dinner last night

Observations:

Structuring my day around food and company comes as naturally to me here in the magical queendom of Hedgebrook as it does in the big shitty.

Taking oneself seriously as a writer is directly proportionate to thinking that it's all a farce and you're boring, even yourself.

A nettle sting, even to the tip of the pinky, is powerful. Surely that was a spider bite, I thought as the pain radiated out from the base of the nail and into the tip. It tingled, pins and needles for twelve hours.

The distance between being a woman respectable in appearance and well-spoken, to being a harridan with damp hair in the woods, haranguing herself, is short.

Hedgebrook, Day Five

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Hedgebrook, Day Four

After yesterday's walk 

I am here at Hedgebrook with five other women residents, and we are mixed in age, in nationality and in race. We are both straight and lesbian.  We each have our own enchanted cottage, not far from one another but far enough to sit undisturbed to do our individual work. Every evening, promptly at 5:30 we walk down a forest path with baskets and meet in the farmhouse for dinner, cooked for us right there with vegetables and flowers and fruit from the garden. We help ourselves from bowls and platters, arrayed on the same butcher block where the chef has prepared them, and then we sit down to eat at a long pine table with a view of Useless Bay. Yes, Useless Bay -- a name worthy of a post far longer than these that I will be writing for the next three weeks. The food is remarkable, simple and full of flavor. The chef sits with us and eats, too. I believe there are three of them who rotate through, all women who cater to and nourish us yet have a place at the woman table. At the end of the meal, the chef clears the table and begins to clean the kitchen while we pack our baskets with snacks, coffee, breakfast for the next morning. We spoon homemade granola out of jars, yogurt out of tubs, and coffee into little bags. We take fresh raspberries from the garden, so sweet and ripe that they disintegrate into syrup, almost, by the next day. There are snacks in jars along shelves --  peanut butter and pretzels, nuts and dried fruit, salty Asian crackers, seaweed and chocolate-covered mangos. Our lunch for the following day is neatly packed into a tupperware container -- a slice of quiche or a frittata, a chickpea salad, mixed lettuces and fruit. When our baskets are full we say good-bye to one another and walk back through the forest to our cottages where, I imagine, we all bow our heads in one way or another to the grace of this place and to our work.

Hedgebrook, Day Three

Deer Lagoon, Whidbey Island

I worked all morning today, have reached California, 1998. I walked to Useless Bay and then back along a dyke through Deer Lagoon. I pretended not to notice when what might have been tens of thousands of miniature dragonflies swarmed me, the whir of their wings so constant in my ear that I finally waved my hands in front of my face as I walked. I saw rabbits, a deer, several herons and transparent crabs that skittered over my feet and disappeared into the sand. I trudged home in the hot sun, sticky. I collapsed on my bed and shared a glass of water with a moth who fluttered up and out as I tipped the water back.

Hedgebrook, Day 2

It's a day of love in the land we call country, an affirmation met with as much wonder in the woods as the city. It's a day, too, of amazing grace, I hear, sung by our own leader in a voice as rich as we all are to have him.

I slept last night with the window open, the sound of frogs and crickets, the dark as absolute as my nakedness. Today I read in bed for hours, walked in a meadow buzzing with dragonflies, opened my computer and a manuscript that I haven't worked on in years and began.


I am in You and 
You in me,
Mutual in 
Love Divine

William Blake

Hedgebrook, Day One

This is my little cottage in piney woods. Light slants through the pines, birds are chirping, breezes blow, there's a vegetable and flower garden with opium poppies, holly hocks and sweet peas, and the rugged beach is less than two miles down the road.

I feel like someone slipped a mind-altering hallucinogenic into my water.

Buh-Bye!

I'm off to Hedgebrook in the morning, and while I am incredibly grateful and excited, I'm also feeling a little batshit crazy.

I'm not sure what my posting schedule will look like, as I'm told it's best to immerse yourself into the magic of the place with as few distractions as possible. I will, hopefully, get lots of writing done as well as respite and the chance to meet some extraordinary women. I might take photos and perhaps post them each day with something or other to keep ya'll entertained, but there'll probably only be slim pickins at the old a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. 

In the meantime, keep abreast of that whole cannabis Big Pharma thing. It's all going down tomorrow in Washington, D.C. when the big guns meet. You know how I feel about it all, and never have I been more sure and committed about an issue. Scroll down to yesterday's post, read, share and join us if you are so inclined. Just click this link: Coalition for Access Now

I miss you already.













P.S. If you want to write me a letter, email me and I'll send you the address!