The Sunday Salon: Falling Through Space

I’m not really falling through space. In fact, I’m sitting at my desk watching the eastern sky turn all kinds of rosy pink as the sun begins to rise on this chilly fall morning. Awake at 5 am today, I surrendered to the mental monkeys tumbling around in my head and got out of bed, pulled on a sweater and made a beeline for the coffeepot. First cup firmly in hand, I curled up on the couch to finish reading Falling Through Space, a slim paperback volume I uncovered on my bookshelf while packing up books for our move. Subtitled “the journals of Ellen Gilchrist,” the book (published in 1987) is really more of an extended essay, a slightly stream of consciousness rambling about life and writing and being a woman. I can’t recall if I’ve ever read any of Gilchrist’s books - one novel and three collections of short stories are mentioned on the back cover - but I’m always keen to read the thoughts of women who write, especially Southern women who write.

I like Gilchrist’s easygoing, meandering style in this book, which she divides into three sections: Origins, Influences, and Work. Clearly a woman of spirit and spunk, Gilchrist was born on the bayou, and deeply influenced by it’s history and natural rhythms. Yet she has “moved around” all her life, she says, “going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones.” Picking up and moving, “tearing up a perfectly nice comfortable life and going off to live somewhere else... is as natural to me as staying in one place is to other people."

Well, that couldn’t be more different from my experience, as I am certainly one of those people to whom staying in one place is “natural.”

But here is a thought - “nothing in the long history of our species has prepared us to be comfortable,” Gilchrist says. “When life becomes comfortable for an artist the energy stops. Being comfortable is so boring it makes us drink and take drugs and bet on football games. Anything for a little excitement."

It seems to me there are many levels of “comfort,” and for each of us - artist or not - we need to find the one that suits us best. Long ago I accepted the fact that in order to live I needed the safety of routine, that taken too far out of my familiar environment, out of my “comfort zone,” I was uneasy. All my energy then went toward keeping the fear at bay, rather than to the work that needed doing. I don’t need to go searching for excitement because so often I find it in the pages of a book, in the poignancy of a Chopin nocturne, the depths of a Monet painting.

The rosy glow of the eastern sky early on a crisp autumn morn.

I’m feeling pretty comfortable this morning, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

How about you?

Where I’ve Been

I haven’t forgotten this little corner of my world. But this very big corner of my world is SO much more important right now.

I’ll be back soon, promise.

In the meantime, I hope all your life’s corners are happy ones.

Betwixt and Between

So here I am. Sitting at my desk on the second floor at Brookwood Court, watching the leaves fluttering outside the window as dusk settles over the rose colored sky.

We’re slowly getting our bearings in this new space, working out the traffic patterns for getting dressed in the morning, exercising the gray matter every time we need a coffee cup, an aspirin, a pair of socks. (Which cupboard? What drawer?) Not only is our house different, but so is most of our furniture because we used the pieces that were in our home in Florida. And while we’re familiar with them, we didn’t live with them for long periods of time.

There is a difference.

One of the things I was hungry for when I moved was the opportunity to change my routine. I felt stagnant, so mired in the same way of doing things. When you live one place for 37 years, your patterns become like cement. I thought moving would be a good way to shake them up.

Boy, was I right about that. And it’s exciting to have this clean slate to work with.

I won’t kid you - I sometimes long for my other house, my old familiar life. Especially in the evening when darkness starts to fall and I start getting tired. Time to go home, I find myself thinking. Time to put the dogs out in the yard for one last potty stop, time to close the blinds in the living room. Time to pour a glass of wine and curl up in my reading chair. Time to  settle on the couch in the breezeway to watch TV.

It will take time before this really feels like home. I know that. Clearly I am still betwixt and between, my body learning to live in and love Brookwood Court, my heart still yearning a little for the familiarity of MacArthur Street and all the memories there.

So I shed a few tears and move on. Take the dogs for a walk around the block. Climb the stairs to my writing desk between the two corner windows. Retract the awning over the deck and lock up the doorwall. Pour a glass of wine and settle on the couch in the den to watch TV.

These are the things I do over and over until one day it will be home.

On the Reading Playground

I’m over at The Estella Society today, the new reading playground for book bloggers that Andi and Heather just built, where I ponder age, literary heroines and their relationships, and sex. Come over and check it out.

The Sunday Salon: Reading and Rambling Along

Nothing stops me from reading.

You all know that.

No matter how many boxes need packing, how much stuff needs sorting, how much laundry needs doing, when my heart feels tugged toward my book my body soon follows it to the comfy chair in the corner of my writing room where I can curl up and escape into a different world.

Throughout my entire life, I’ve found books my most tried and true companions. When I’m happy, I love to celebrate it with reading. When I’m hurting, losing myself in the words and ideas of others soothes my soul for a while.

For the books I’ve loved the most, I’m always curious to know more about their authors. So often, reading a book sends me down a virtual pathway to that writers door. I research biographies, collections of letters, published versions of their journals. If you were to search my shelves, you’d find little villages where an author “lives” in the printed word, surrounded by her own books like she would be children.  Madeleine L’Engle has a large amount of real estate in this neighborhood. So do Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. As does Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Anna Quindlen is there - her novels and her memoirs. Gail Godwin’s novels have been joined recently by her two volumes of memoir.

Over the years, there has been criticism devoted to people who try and place authors too squarely in their work, who try and figure out what it was in the writer’s personal life that led them to write a certain character or develop a certain theme.

It shouldn’t matter, they’ve said. The writer’s personal life does not affect our interpretation of her work.

But how can it not? I think. And why wouldn’t I want it to? For me, it adds that extra bit of seasoning when I realize how an author’s own personality or life experience has shaped their work. It’s a gift, an extra layer in the cake that makes up our shared human experience.

It’s also one of the things that I’ve loved about “book blogging.” It has allowed me to meet so many writers through their blogs and on their Facebook and Twitter. It does not at all detract from the “mystery” of their writing. On the contrary, it adds a deeper dimension to my reading of their books.

Reading is the whole package for me - it’s The Story, but it’s also about the Creator of The Story. I love getting to know both of them.