Reflections on something as light as a leaf
small brave thing #247
Hello beautiful human,
On Wednesdays, I invite my Circle to come to the Well, a liminal crossroads made possible via the interwebs. Across time zones and countries we gather for an hour and each week I ask everyone to bring a treasure. Find the gift the day presents that you can share with us.
These Reflections are a similar invitation to myself. I find, once we start keeping an eye or ear attuned for messages and gifts delivered from the wide world, we begin noticing them everywhere.
Last weekend we were out and about down in Iowa, visiting the folks and reminding the powerful that we don’t much take to kings around here. That’s how I found myself on Sunday morning writing my daily-ish three pages in a hotel breakfast area filled with football fans home for game day weekend. I found a seat at a table by a window, popped my earbuds in, and made sure to sit with my back to the TV. My view of the parking lot and fields beyond was not immediately inspiring, but there’s something about filling three pages. By the end you get somewhere you didn’t know you were going.
Summer stayed around this year, longer than usual it seemed, but the wind keeps trying to shift the season on us. This particular Sunday morning it found a leaf to play with, a single leaf amid all those littered across the asphalt expanse of parking lot. Why the wind chose only one, and this one, and left all the others to lie inert I do not know. I wondered. And then I lost myself in the play of the leaf as it tumbled and skipped across the lot. Grass waved and shivered around the edges. The small brown leaf somersaulted and skittered. The sky stretched, an uninterrupted and unimpressed blue. No one else saw. Had I not been at that window looking for things to write about, I wouldn’t have witnessed it either.
The leaf’s dance and progress would have been the same of course. It didn’t care if it was noticed or not. At least I don’t think it did.
All at once I had that dizzyfying sensation, perhaps familiar to you, of realizing that all over the planet, similar small moments take place every minute. I gripped the table as apples fell, wind blew across fields, coyotes howled in a canyon, pumpkins rotted on vines. All without witness. I used to get the same dizzy feeling standing on the pedestrian bridge that stretched over California’s Highway 101 in San Mateo. Ten lanes of nonstop traffic, whooshing below me at 80-90 miles an hour, and all of those cars and trucks had people inside them and all of those people had lives, separate from each other and from me and just as fascinating and intense and kaleidoscope-colored as my own.
Yes, intellectually I realize the world goes on without my witness. I do know this. But as laughable as it may sound, we rarely escape our egos and self-tuned lenses to feel the universe at play, delighting in itself for itself, careless if it is noticed. To feel that is quite another thing. For a minute, amid all those Hawkeye fans eating their waffles and yogurts, I vanished.
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I was in that room because I’m playing around with changing up my writing practice again, pushing myself to get back to Julia Cameron’s original idea for morning pages – three full pages, a full steam, unimpeded stream of language emptying pushing past resistance to recover or discover what comes out on the page when we turn the editor all the way off just keep the pen moving and don’t stop to think too hard if you must pause that’s okay but push into the page, the next line, the next word, the next subject because that is how we get to where we didn’t know we needed to go that’s how I got to that leaf.
And…just so you know, because I don’t want to mislead you, and I don’t want to encourage rigidity or perfectionism in any of this: in different seasons, I’ve gone easier on myself, opened the journal and counted the job done if I got a paragraph or a few idle lists. Just sitting with pen in hand and notebook open is enough, I’ve told myself. We have to respect that there are seasons and shifts in our practices, whether pages or pushups. A foolish consistency would be a hobgoblin.
But there is something about filling three pages (big pages, for me, full spiral notebook 8.5x11 sheets of lined paper) that takes the writing beyond direction or intent. By the end of the third page, somehow, somewhere, something has come up and been caught, even just in notation form. Something as light as a leaf skittering across a parking lot. Something I circle and remind myself Come back to this.
With all the shift, I’ve been quiet for a number of weeks. It may have been a whole month, I think it has. I’m aware of the urge to apologize to you for my absence. Sitting at my computer today, I notice the sensation of debt, that I owe you my words. That this is somehow transactional, and more—I notice that there is fear here, lodged deep within: if I don’t publish soon, will I lose you? Surely I need to acknowledge and promise, plead for you to stay, say I’m sorry for my lapse…
Sitting here in reflection, I recognize this pattern and I wonder at it. What’s really going on with these content creation platforms and audiences? What is the shape of this and what is it supposed to be?
We’re all of us pushed and pulled by the algorithms, which keep trying to mold and define us, don’t they. They—and the people behind them—want to shape and direct how we interact with each other. Manipulating what we see and who we hear and in all the bids for audience and attention amid the incessant noise, we’re fed stories of scarcity and lack. In our attempts, we’re beginning to look and sound a little bit same-ish. Have you noticed? Short choppy sentences and paragraphs. Warnings and moanings about our ridiculously short attention spans. Lessons on how to grab attention and keep it across all the distractions which are always only a single click away.
This is no apology reader. My silence was intentional, for I want something different. I want a slower, wilder, less predictable kind of movement. I’ve been quiet for weeks, waiting—and now here comes a breeze and like that I’m cartwheeling back to San Mateo where
if I walked in a different direction, away from the busy highway, I would come to the beautiful central park with its Japanese garden, rose garden, play structures and large grassy expanses. Sometimes there would be a tai chi class, you’ve seen them too, moving with grace and focus at such a different pace than the joggers, young families and eager dogs. There in a clearing, they would create their own rhythm and reality, and as I remember them now, I can imagine they sculpted time itself with their synchronized movements.
For me, good writing is not the same as good copy, or good (flinch) content. Good living is not a series of Instamoments. Good writing and good living are craft. Craft takes time. It’s more interesting to me, when I feel the breeze pick me up and dance me into all that blue, to take that moment and slow. To hold it a while, and make something that pleases me in itself. I continue to recover and discover myself through the craft, I take on a shape, which is what writing does. Which is what we do, day by day. This is spell work and deep creation, an establishing of context, relation, and meaning. Consideration. Boundaries are permeable. Shapes can shift. Perhaps you also have felt the invitation to care, craft, and (re)imagine. To pay attention, that most valuable resource. Perhaps you too dream of crafting, say, oh say can you see, a nation, for instance, better and more sustainably and equitably grounded than what came before. You’re not alone.
Can we slip the algorithm reader? We don’t need a hundred voices writing the same rhythms in unison and publishing in predictable patterns. We don’t need the same faces filling our screens, puffed and carved and sanded smooth. I search out quirks, gaps, stretch marks, wrinkles. Semi-colons, parentheticals, odd capitalizations. Sudden laughter and homemade lemonade. I reach for hands that know care and lives that attest to hardwon experience.
Something about that leaf—let’s follow it for a moment– how the wind lifted it and played it along the pavement. How I happened to witness it and write it down. How I then happened to choose that moment, out of all the others I could have written about. How I keep coming back to and stretching towards that lightness. I don’t know much about Tai Chi—I’m certainly no practitioner—but I understand the idea that using force in the face of force doesn’t work for the long term. I understand that softness will in the end overcome hardness, in ways we don’t predict and on timescales we can’t imagine but may witness. It’s difficult to slow down and find stillness, and even more challenging to think about delight and playfulness, while watching the wrecking crew attack the East Wing of the White House. As it has been hard, also, to experience the dismantling of our democracy by all three branches of the federal government in their ghastly marionette Dance of the Billionaires.
And.
Destruction is the necessary precursor to creation. Soft power is the mother of hard power and nevertheless, she will persist, though this is not the story we’re most familiar with. We can write new stories. I believe we already are. Stay ready. I swear that breeze wants to help us shift the season. Feel for it.
What do we want to create today?
xo
S
I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.
A Celebration Corner for sharing the Good Goodies
Want to connect? Here’s where you can find me in the months coming up:
It’s almost here! On November 13 The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets is hosting my online workshop, “Three Questions and a Poem,” a workshop designed to generate new material and new approaches to listening, and new for poets and non-poets alike. This is an opportunity to discover those new stories I keep talking about, and maybe even get a poem or two out of the experience too! Register at the link. I’d love to see you.
I don’t talk much about my 1-2-1 work with individuals. Like the old woman in the woods, I generally believe if people want to find me, they will. You might too, if you find yourself on that path through the tangle.
Around here, I’m in the Circle on most Wednesdays, when we gather via zoom at the Well to strengthen our listening and creative practices in community. Join the Circle here. Or, if you want to just try it out sometime, sign up for an upcoming Wednesday and join us. There’s more to come!
Your support is welcome, and your attention and time are true gifts. Thank you.
