April Is No Fool

A lesson in clinging: the winter that is so reluctant to let go. Every now and then we get a teaser, a day when it actually feels like spring. It lasts a day or two, then - well, today, for example. Back in the 30s and a winter weather advisory for the overnight.

A lesson in clinging. If you want something new, you gotta let go - mostly of expectations. Winter and spring are in this intense dance this year, more intense than in many years, and it is exhilarating to be in it, to watch the wrestling match, knowing that the cycle does ultimately tell us which one will finally relent.

More-than-memoir and the co-arising of a book

The day before my writers critique group (we meet about every other week) I always feel a little edge added to my work. What I have been sharing these past many months is what I call my "more-than-memoir," using the multi-generational story of my family to open up some deeper reflection on the culture and the many layers of impasse and crisis at which we have arrived.

In this story of my parents and their ancestors, and what was passed down to my generation, I think I have found a key to why it is so hard for us to look at the mess we have made of our world - and change how we live accordingly before things really get out of hand.

My parents, Mary Rose & Steve

The mess is getting pretty serious now, as we know from two years of weather extreme after weather extreme, the infernos in the West, the deepening drought that is sadly only herald of worse to come, the changing economy that has thrown more people permanently out of work, depressed wages, and brought millions more of our own people into poverty, to join the hundreds of millions around the planet.

Can writing serve the purpose of helping us take an honest look at ourselves, how it is we have arrived at such a moment?

Writing for survival

"...it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one's eyes."

So grateful for the many bold and courageous women writers who over the past decades have made it less lonely to open one's eyes. They don't tell us it's easy, just necessary in order to live one's real authentic life.

"It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful."

Yes, all of those things. Because to awaken consciousness means to wake up to what's really going on, to the damage that has been done, to the long road it will take to recover, to heal, to begin life anew.

I'm quoting Adrienne Rich again, this time from an essay: '"When We Dead Awaken": Writing as Re-vision,' in the volume, Arts of the Possible. These days I'm working on memoir and family history, and, in that narrative, searching for some wisdom that can shed light on this moment in our country, a story that is in many ways paradigmatic of our culture's crisis of meaning, a window through which to view how it is that we have come to this point of cultural dis-articulation and fragmentation. We seem so lost.