I don't want to write about Nature

And now for something a bit different...  Here's a piece I wrote in my writers' group today.  The prompt was "I don't want to write about..."

I don’t want to write about Nature because I have nothing to say.  How can I admit to people that when I’m in the woods, my pervasive invasive thought is to worry that a branch will fall on me and knock me senseless?  I worry another flood will come like happened when we camped out when I was 9, and Agnes, the hurricane, rose overnight and knocked out the bridge so we had to hike out of the woods, forging streams that had turned into raging swells.  I worry it’ll be so cold we’ll wake up – or not wake up – with icicles on our noses, and I don’t have a dog or two siblings anymore to sleep with to retain at least a modicum of body heat like I did when I was 8 camping in the woods on the coldest August night on record.

I worry I’ll get tick bites and will end up with Lyme’s disease again and I won’t know it until the damage is so pervasive It ruins my life – sort of like happened two years ago when I finally got comfortable hiking in Larus Park in the Spring but then couldn’t explain the six week headache that literally flattened me for several days and turned out to be Lyme’s disease – maybe.

I worry about sand flies imbedding themselves in my thigh and my not noticing the spread of the red oozing gushy sore like happened to a friend of mine on the cruise two months ago.  I worry about organisms invading my digestive system and causing my stool to shift shape and color like has been the case since I returned from the cruise.

So I don’t want to write about Nature, it’s beauty, the connection I feel to God out there among the tress, the sand, the stars, the animals – those raging wild beasts whose only desire is to beat me to eating the food I’ve so painfully carried up the mountain – not for the bear – for me.  I don’t want to write about the cute little critters staring at me with their luminous brown eyes, the extension of God’s creation incarnate.  Those are the same damn ones that got into my house, crawled up and across the rafters then fell with a horrifying plop between the walls in the basement bathroom.  The one I had to listen to for days trying to scratch itself out of said walls as its scratches got weaker and weaker until finally they faded completely and the stench grew until it overpowered all reason and drove me out into the very outdoors I do not want to write about.

3/1/2013

The path to enlightenment is figure drawing

Each Friday I meet with a group of women to write.  Each week a different one of us is the leader who picks readings or artwork to prompt us to do the best writing we can.  This week Denise chose a poem by Billy Collins called Tension.

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and, beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
Another drip from the faucet?
Another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone's guess.

The sun rose ever higher.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountain to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
suddenly fringed with little colorful, dangling balls.

From The Paris Review via Turk's Head Review.

We had ten minutes to write whatever we chose to in response to the poem.  Here's what I wrote:

Billy Collins' poem about the ordinariness of life became extraordinary the moment he added the word "suddenly" to it.  Then each action like opening a can of cat food took on a cosmic import.  Perhaps that is the way to enlightenment - to perceive everything, every single simple action, as sudden and surprising and noteworthy, even a lie-down on the sofa and a daydream about a land beyond the Andes.

How would it be if each stroke I drew were that noteworthy?  My teacher Tommy suggested I stand back from my two-minute gesture drawing we both liked with a fond attachment.  Stand back and contemplate with total attention the light landing upon her body, the shadows falling just so and defining her form.  Then, once I attained knowledge of the next right move, only then, approach the easel and carefully, mindfully, with absolute intent, place the mark I was meant to make.  Just so.

Then back off and contemplate her body again, the curved black armchair I've drawn scores of times now, the aqua-flowered pattern of her silk robe she sits upon, the perfection of her close-cropped boy-hair.  Notice the light and shadow on that spiky hair as it traverses her skull.  Trace the depth along her arm with my eye down my arm through the conte' crayon onto the newsprint.  Just so.

Suddenly?  In one way of looking at it, perhaps it is sudden, but to me several ice ages have come and gone while I observe and sense and monitor and express.  Each synapse is attended to as it transfers information about the bones beneath the skin of her knee from my eyes, through my brain, down my neck, into my arm, fingers, charcoal, all one - not sudden at all, a wagon train on the Conestoga Trail making its way at great peril to the ultimate goal of a new life.