Persistence, Priorities, Saying No and Letting Go

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.

--Neil Gaiman,  Make Good Art

Last year, I made a series of attempts to work through The Artist's Way. From the beginning of Lent to Easter, I made it--with a skipped task here and there--about halfway through Week 3. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have known this for awhile, but my attempt with a workbook brought it into clearer relief: Persistence is a problem for me. I don't lack persistence, really, but I am more persistent about some things than I'd like to be, and much, much less persistent than I'd like to be about a few important things.

I'm capable of being extremely persistent when obligation or loyalty are involved. I have persisted, sometimes for years, in jobs that didn't make sense but paid the rent, hobbies that had become chores, relationships that were damaging and even dangerous. At times I have come to a hazy realization that those obligations I'm persisting in are crippling my ability to be persistent about relationships, work, and activities that are more important to me. My usual reaction when that dissonance starts to grate has been to abandon everything and everyone all at once, even things I would like to have continued. I quit playing violin, moved (many times), quit or got fired from jobs, changed voice teachers, tried to start over, and over, and over. Of course it never worked, this tearing myself out by the roots every two years and starting over. The past leaked into the present. I was full of regrets over letting so many things get to the point where I could not leave gracefully, and new obligations gradually clouded over the clean slate I had tried to create in a kind of personal/spiritual "mission creep." It's the kind of pattern that intensifies every time it repeats itself until no amount of moving, changing jobs, leaving friends, or abandoning hobbies is enough. That's when the serious trouble starts. I dove headfirst down the rabbit-hole of an eating disorder. It was my own little world. It was very quiet, and very simple. I thought about dying, and when that scared me too much, I mistook a manipulative man in a plastic collar for Jesus and followed him halfway across the country. (He liked that very much. I barely survived.)

What does all that have to do with that Neil Gaiman speech?

Catty Queen Bee McJudgypants, my imaginary frenemy.

So, you think you're going cross-country skiing? You don't know how to do that. They're going to know, at the gas station, when you go to get your ski pass, that you don't know how to ski. And even though you're going to one of the smaller trails, and this is the middle of nowhere, there will be fifty people at the trail head, and they will all stare at you. They found out that you were going to try to ski today. The gas station people radioed ahead. They will all be gathered at the trail head to laugh at you. They will know just by the way you put your boots on that you don't know what you're doing. You probably have the wrong boots anyway. And the wrong clothes. And skis, and poles, and face. They will all be impossibly thin and fit, that wispy-yet-strong professional dancer kind of fit that you wish you were. They will be outfitted in all the latest gear and they will all have flawless skin and perfect teeth, which will gleam at you as they point and laugh and whisper to each other about you. They will have agents stationed all around the trail. Every time you lose momentum and have to shuffle/stagger up a slope, someone will come zipping up from behind you and blithely sail over the hill past you. They'll probably even catch air they'll be going so fast. When you get your skis tangled trying to go around a turn and fall over, someone will jump out from the woods and sit on you and push your face into the snow and laugh. On every downhill, just as you're starting to feel like you're going a little bit too fast, someone will throw a stick out in front of you. Every 30 seconds, someone will ski by at a leisurely pace (but still faster than you) and give you an icy glare as if to say, "You, you beginner. Dilettante. Plebeian. You disgust me." Oh, they will judge you. They will judge you mercilessly. They will judge you all the way around the trail and all the way back to town. They will radio back to the gas station people just what a moron you are. Then the gas station people will tell all their friends, and they will tell their friends, and everyone will judge you and hate you and turn your friends and family against you, and you'll have to go live at the laundromat.

But by all means, try skiing today. Have fun!

Love/Fear

Memory is more indelible than ink.

--Anita Loos

What do you love? Ink. What do you fear? Memory.

These were questions and answers from a writing group hosted by my friend Rose. We made lists, picked salient words from the lists, and wrote about them. My own response surprised me in the "love list." Cooper, Clare, music, ink--wait, ink? Who loves ink? The "fear list" was far more predictable. It was long, but "memory" more or less summed it up. I still spend many of my waking hours, and sometimes my sleeping ones, haunted by my past.

I wrote what I thought were unrelated snippets, but I'm beginning to think there is more of a connection than I thought...

A Sense of Place

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

A friend of mine visiting from the Twin Cities asked me a few weeks ago whether people here just get used to being in such a beautiful place.
I suppose some who've lived here for a very long time, or the kids I know who have always lived here, might. For me, though, the answer is no, at least not for any serious length of time. During bouts of depression, when it's difficult to get outside, I might forget for a few days or even a week, but inevitably something about this place will sneak up and knock me right out of my head. The ever-changing moods of the big lake, a wolf appearing like a phantom on the side of the highway, thunderclouds rolling in over the water, the bright green of new leaves striping the hills.

Get me off this crazy thing!

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry A. Kissinger

Well, so much for my determination to write consistently. Lately, after even a week of not writing, I end up with the feeling that I couldn't possibly ever find enough words to catch up with what has gone on during the gap. Not that I have to, I suppose.

In a continuing chiaroscuro theme, I lost my job and got engaged in the same week. So, I've been scrambling to cobble a few random jobs together, figure out how to apply for medical assistance and unemployment, and popping down to the cities to visit my fiance's parents and friends and start planning the wedding, and performing in two concerts in as many weeks. An awful lot of things in my life are going really remarkably well. Just a few "flies in the ointment," right?