Month: February 2013

Expecting Inspiration

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For the past few weeks my waking hours have been spent mostly shut off from the world.

I rise before dawn to write and read – forcing myself to shut out the world that beckons from the internet.  At 7 AM, I’ll wake my boys and spend the next 45 minutes getting them dressed, fed, and chauffeured to school.  Then I’ll come home and take care of the few chores I do on a daily basis before sitting down to work until dark again.  I’ll re-emerge from my work area in time to make dinner and start the cycle all over again.  The short winter days ensure that I rarely see daylight, but the thing I have noticed the most as my job demands more from my family life with the waxing tax season, is that spending less time with my family often means that I spend less time with my blog.

I first noticed this one recent weekend when basketball practice inspired another post and a story for an e-book I’m working.  I sat down in the the gym at 8:15 AM on a Saturday, watched Thing1 and  Thing2 finish an argument over something important (like which is the better color – red or green) and, as Thing2 began his basketball dance, I felt the urge to pull out my notebook and pen.  I didn’t stop writing for the entire morning.  Doodles and ideas flowed.

Sunday was equally productive.  The ideas and stories overflowed into Monday, but by Tuesday, I spent most of the previous two days away from my family.  When I put the kids to bed, I realized I had seen them for 2 waking hours.  Simultaneously, the story well seemed to go dry and stay that way for a day or two.

Part of me has been resentful of this new routine.  As great as it is to work at home, it can be really difficult to explain to younger children that, even though you’re home, you’re not available.  And, through the door, I can hear the evening antics and arguments as homework and its tribulations unfold around the kitchen table.  The fairy tale is unfolding without me.

But even as I’m already feeling left out and dreading the seemingly lifeless hours in the day ahead, I’m finding an unexpected story this morning.  This story is about the very light causing the shadows.  It’s about the good fortune to be shut up in a warm room and to have enough food to feed a family at the end of the day.  It’s about not fearing about necessities.  But most of all, this tale is about realizing how fortunate it is to have a reason to feel the absence of the stories happening just on the other side of the study door.

Stopped by Woods

 

It’s February, and the sledding hill on the west side of town is naked.  The Battenkill River that runs west from the center of Arlington, Vermont to the New York line has been frozen for only a few days this winter.  It’s the second year in a row in which winter hasn’t really felt like winter but more like a long clouding, mud season.  Grey prevails today, lulling us into our individual reveries as we drive about our Saturday routine.

Then as we drive home, turning back onto the road that runs along the Battenkill, the park and adjacent outdoor ice rink come into view.  A shock of white now rises over the river.  As we get closer, we realized the white is ice and snow covering the trees on the river bank.  The ice doesn’t cover everything – it only coated a small clump of trees –  but the covering was so thick and sugary in appearance, that if looked like someone had sculpted it.

The sky is still overcast and grey, but now, roused out of our apathy, the flat light seems to throw everything into stark relief.  A stop by the park has suddenly become an impromptu visit to an art museum, and we continue on home, suddenly aware of the other exhibits around us.

Schooled on a Saturday

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It’s the first Saturday in February. Thing2’s basketball team has grown to five members. They’ve drafted one of the player’s big sisters to get two teams of three for an impromptu scrimmage. The brother and sister act like a most six- and seven-year-old brothers and sisters would on a basketball court, but most of the competition is friendly and fun.

In a matter of weeks, the coach has turned this mini mob – some of whom could hardly dribble in December – into a team. Thing2’s multi-talented superhero alter ego, Superdude, only occasionally makes appearances when he’s waiting for a ball to come back into play. Mostly, though, our six-
year-old is focused.

The dad-turned-coach has taught them to dribble and pass. He’s taught them to shoot and guard. And most of all, he’s spend his Saturday mornings schooling them on the fine art of fumbling and falling – and even losing – and walking away with a smile.

Going to the Well

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I’ve been thinking about anger a lot lately. How I don’t write when I’m angry. How when I do, it’s rarely something I can post. How what makes me angry maybe something I can control but only by causing tremendous collateral damage to the people I love most in the world. How sometimes courage is not changing the things you can but, rather, enduring those things for someone else.

Today I’m not feeling any serenity from knowing what I could and couldn’t change. My anger could almost swallow me whole on this cold February morning. I am watching my two little touchstones – Thing1 and Thing2, and most of the time, they have a psychotropic effect on my darkness. I sometimes wonder if they are the remedy or if their antics and exuberance are more anesthetic than answer. I know that in my wondering, I’m tacitly admitting that the remedy is in me somewhere. I’m just don’t know where.

Sometimes I feel guilty and self-indulgent writing about anger or even dwelling on it. For the most part, I try to follow Woody Allen’s advice when he says, through the character of Gertrude Stein in the movie Midnight in Paris that the artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence. But, nine months ago, when I started this blog, I said to the mentor of a Writer’s Workshop at Hubbard Hall, our local community theatre and art center, that I wanted to become a real writer.

At the time, for me, that meant becoming a published author. That is still high on my priority list, but one of the beauties of writing in this group, has been that it has breathed new meaning into what it meant to become a real writer. It is more than finding a publisher or finishing a first opus. It is about writing – and living – authentically. It is about recognizing the good, the bad and the ugly in my own stories – and, hopefully, finding a new meaning in them.