TLC for Me

Writing gives me an opportunity to spend time thinking, and most of what I think about is myself - or at least myself in relation to my family, my home, the world around me, and the things I love to do.  Because I’m introspective by nature, I spend a lot of time dwelling on and writing about my inner thoughts and feelings, and during this year I’ve been paying special attention to those things that help me live the life I desire. I chose the word “Devotion” as my touchstone for the year: I aimed for it to remind me to practice devotion toward the things I deemed important, to treat them with tender loving care. Reflecting on the past 10 months, I can see many ways in which I’ve achieved that goal. I’ve been more careful with my schedule, giving me more time to spend with my family and at home where I’m happiest. I’ve worked to shift my perspective toward an attitude of gratitude, to slow down and appreciate the ordinary sparkling moments that fill each day. I finished my book, Life In General, and it will soon be ready to send to print.

This morning I spent some time with my journal, and I found myself called to write about something that rarely comes up in those pages.

My body.

I’m 58 years old. I’m beginning to notice that parts of my body, this healthy organism that I’ve been taking for granted all these years, doesn’t feel like it once did. My knees ache when I walk too much, especially when I do my beloved Leslie Sansone Walk at Home exercise tapes. My feet hurt every day and I have to wear ugly flat shoes all the time. My hair feels dry and sandy when I touch it. There are bags under my eyes large enough to hold a wardrobe for a European vacation.

I feel as if I’m drying up from the inside out.

It occurred to me this morning that the one thing I’m not very devoted to is this very important part of me: the flesh and bones that house all the activities, thoughts, and feelings I’m so interested in exploring with my writing. I expect a lot from it every day, and I expect it to fulfill those expectations without trouble. Thankfully, for most all of my 58 years, it has done so without complaint. But now, like an exhausted toddler after a long day,  it’s beginning to whine for a little attention.

I’ve never been one to pamper myself with things like spa treatments, oils and perfumes, or designer outfits. They always seemed like unnecessary extravagance. And with age, my interest in those things has diminished even further.

I’ve treated my body with respect but not with tender loving care.

Not with devotion.

I’d like to change that. I want to explore the sensual part of me, to take time to care my physical body. Tend to it. Love it. Smooth fragrant lotion over its dry skin. Keep it warm with soft sweaters and scarves that look as good as they feel against my skin. Feed it fresh, simple food I’ve prepared myself. Move it freely and happily, letting music inspire shoulders, hips, and feet to move in their own way.

I want to notice it, caress it, give it the love and devotion it deserves after so many years of solid service. Lavish it with love and attention.

Devote myself to feeling good, from the outside in.

This Morning

This morning is way too early rising, dark coffee and lots of it, a sweater over summer pajamas that were warm enough when I went to bed but suddenly leave me cold. This morning is curled in a comfy chair lost in story, traveling in time to another world a gifted novelist has spun like silk from his own imagination.

This morning is yoga on a sky-blue mat, unrolled on a whim in the middle of the kitchen floor. This morning is arms reaching to heaven, breath expanding, ribcage spreading, heart opening.

This morning is waiting, waiting for light to overtake this darkness. It is cold-sounding rain, wind ushering out the last of summer and sweeping it impatiently out the door like a guest who overstayed her welcome.

This morning is a rainbow carpet, orange, crimson, gold, a kaleidoscope fallen from the trees and settled for one brief moment under my feet before rushing away to grace another’s.

This day will be steaming hot oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar cinnamon, little dogs in yellow raincoats walking through puddles, Yorkshire Gold tea, thoughtful poems and lovely magazines, a crying kind of movie on DVD, a nap in the big green chair. It will be Chopin nocturnes on the stereo, my fingers playing a ghostly duet in my head even as they slice carrots, potatoes, and onions for slow-cooker soup.

This day will be candles at dusk, cheese and crackers on an small round plate from Portugal. It will be fire in the fireplace, my husband’s hand to hold, a list of our favorite shows to choose from on Tivo. It will be sinking into the warmth of a fragrant bath, clean sheets and a soft blanket, gentle snores and peaceful slumber.

All this loveliness.

And it all starts with This Morning.

On Stewardship

Be a good steward to your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.  

Poet Jane Kenyon intended these words as instructions for writers, a set of inviolable regulations to both promote and protect the creative thought process and the work ethic. Like most people who want to write - or pursue any kind of artistic lifestyle - I yearn for a set of rules to follow. I want someone to lay it out point blank, someone to give me a roadmap. Just do this and thus and so, and at the end you’ll have the masterpiece you want so badly. I want the protocol like the doctor in the emergency room, or the chemist in the laboratory. I want the boilerplate an attorney might use, or the set of formulas an engineer would employ.

In the sense that there are any such things for a creative person, I suppose Jane Kenyon’s principles come as close as anything to fulfilling that role. Protect your time. Have good sentences in your ears. Work regular hours.  Be a good steward to your gifts.

Like anything worth doing, being a good steward to your gifts takes a conscious effort. It starts when I stop scheduling appointments in the morning so I can have that hour or two to work. It continues when I disable the internet (the 21st century version of taking the phone off the hook) and bring both dogs upstairs to my office so they aren’t barking at every other Fido, Max, or Maddie walking by. It’s fed by the inspiration in a select group of books on my desktop, the words of my “teachers” - Dani Shapiro, Katrina Kenison, Anne Lamott, Karen Maezen Miller - who stand before me with gentle encouragement and well-wishes.

Most often the things that derail me from good stewardship are the demands of ordinary life. The grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments, the dog whose hair needs trimming, the laundry that overflows the basket in my closet. These tasks are my job. They don’t pay the bills, but they keep our lives humming smoothly along, which is important for me.  Truth? I am obsessive-compulsive enough that I need that full pantry, clear calendar, and empty laundry basket in order to focus my attention on anything else - like writing.

Or at least I think I do.

Good stewardship, the kind Kenyon talks about, must start with the belief that this writing thing is worth all the effort. And there is the most difficult concept of all. The belief that what I do matters, that the words I try to weave into a coherent whole can make something meaningful. That even if I’m the only person who feels excited about what I put on the page, it’s still necessary to spend the time putting it there.

What I need more than anything is an unwavering conviction in the value of my gift. Only then can I make the dedicated and concerted effort necessary to protect it, nurture it, fulfill it by following Kenyon’s prescriptions. And if I look at her precepts even more closely, I see that they fulfill most of my personal requirements for a good life, irrespective of writing at all.  They are the backbone of a calm and collected way of being that is among my highest aspirations. Feed your inner life. Read good books. Walk. 

Anne Lamott writes about this kind of life in the final pages of Bird by Bird. “This life of reading, writing, corresponding...is nearly ideal. It is spiritually invigorating. It is intellectually quickening. One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as a vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood."

“In this dark and wounded society,” she concludes, “writing can give you the pleasures of a woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, ‘This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.’"

So here I am, in my quiet room at the top of the stairs, my notebook on my lap, my dogs napping peacefully beside me, surrounded by words of my own making and those of writers I admire.

This is my niche. This is where I live now. This is where I belong.

This is my gift.

Clean Slate

In September I buy a new calendar. It’s a habit left over from years of going to school, and later of working in schools. In September the schedule changes, life shifts into overdrive, and time must be managed and arranged rather than simply experienced. At least, that’s the way it used to be.

In reality, things won’t be very different for me this month than they have been for the past three months. But I’m not sure my brain understands this, because something keeps waking me up in the middle of the night, agitating me, poking me, inciting me to get up and get moving because time is a-wastin’. Even though my new fall calendar pages are about as empty as my old summer calendar pages were, my head is filled with lengthy lists, all those things I planned to accomplish this summer, most of which I didn’t. They are nagging me now, wagging their reproachful fingers in my face.

Don’t be fooled with all my recent talk about living in the moment and accepting things as they are, about being patient and present, about living a more mindful and grateful life. Those are wonderful and admirable things, and for about five minutes of every day I catch a glimpse of myself in the act of one or the other of them. It’s rather like walking down the street and seeing your reflection in a store window, wondering for a moment who that very attractive woman might be before realizing it’s only you in your Sunday best, looking all spiffed up for a change.

For most of the time, I’m the same person I’ve always been. I fritter away precious time with things that don’t matter and then reproach myself for my lack of accomplishment. I get impatient with people who don’t see things my way, or behave the way I expect them to. I want more than I have, even though I know I already have more than enough of everything I need. I worry about those blank squares on my calendar pages, wondering if I’ve pared my life down farther than I should.

These are the thoughts that wake me at 4:00 a.m.

Or 3:00 a.m.

Or sometimes even 2:00 a.m.

I know better than to let myself be ruled by these kinds of thoughts, especially now when there really is no good reason for their existence. My life is enviable by any standards, and certainly by my own which have always touted time and independence as major priorities for happiness.

But standing still is not in my nature, so perhaps what I’m feeling is less nagging over what’s undone than a nudge toward forward motion. “The best remedy for anxiety is concrete action.” How often I forget that sometimes I have to get out of my head and actually live in the real world. Grab a pencil and fill in the blank spots on my calendar, one activity, one action, one event, one moment at a time. Go for a walk, a bike ride, a yoga class. Get a haircut, get some groceries, make some meals. Play the piano. Write. Read.

It doesn’t have to be like Septembers of old, in the days of juggling two jobs and three musical groups along with the responsibilities of family and home. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

It can just be one thing, one baby step, one calendar square at a time.

Presence of Mind

These is much talk these days of “mindfulness,” of “living in the now.” I’ve done some of that talking myself, here on this very page. We are all so busy, it seems, wearing our busy-ness like a badge of honor, teaching our children the dubious virtues of a “full life” with teams and lessons and after school study groups. And yet in the midst of all that productive busy-ness, something is amiss. We become aware of a gnawing emptiness, a feeling that surely there is more than all this running to and fro. During the past few weeks, I’ve been given many opportunities to be mindful and to live in the now, opportunities to practice paying attention and appreciating small moments.

Opportunities to be patient and present.

This gift (for I am calling it a gift, even though at first it seemed to be anything but - which is so often true of these kinds of gifts) began when one of my dogs became seriously ill. The details don’t matter, and he is doing fine now, but he was hospitalized for several days in a specialized veterinary hospital about 40 miles from our home. His doctor was the soul of kindness and compassion, combined with an obvious intelligence about the internal workings of the canine body.  He called me three times each day that Magic was in the hospital, giving me an update on current conditions and his treatment plan going forward.

One of our biggest concerns was that Magic wasn’t eating, had not been eating well for some time. I had been trying everything at home to entice his appetite, mostly to no avail. I would cajole and prod, but he only turned his head away at each proffered bite. I got frustrated.

On Friday evening, Dr. Becker calls me at 7:00 p.m. with some good news, that Magic has eaten at last. “I’ve been sitting with him for about an hour,” Dr. Becker tells me matter-of-factly, “coaxing him along, and he finally showed some interest."

My sense of relief was quickly followed by a sense of wonder. Imagine that this doctor, a man who surely is “busy” in every sense of the word spent an hour of his time on a beautiful summer evening coaxing my little dog to eat.

Such patience.

Suddenly all my striving, my agitation, my bluster and hurry seemed so silly. What was the rush? especially when most of my days are my own to fill or not as I choose? My dog, whom I love and who has given me 12 years of loyal faithfulness and joy, surely deserved better than my irritated impatience when he didn’t eat the food I provided for him. What is time for, if not to be lavished on what we love the most?

Magic is home now, and his feeding time has become my exercise in patience and presence. I sit on the floor, offering very tiny bites of things that will tempt him - roast beef, cheese, a little salami or ham. He is reluctant at first, he still needs coaxing, needs quiet attention paid and some gentle urging. But finally he will accede to one bite, one little morsel, followed by another, and then another, until the plate is clean.

I remain present, there on the floor beside him. I stop thinking about the phone calls I need to make, the kitchen remodeling I want to do, the book that needs editing, the music I should organize. I practice patience.

It seems to me that much of our drive to be busy is born from fear. We’re afraid we’ll miss opportunities to experience something wonderful, to create the next big thing, to enjoy life as it was meant to be.  We worry we don’t accomplish all that must be accomplished in order to have the perfect body, the perfect house, the perfect garden. We’re greedy - we want to gobble ravenously, when perhaps we should nibble decorously. Yet we say we must learn to be mindful, we must try to live in the now, adding those things to our already long lists of things to accomplish when we have more time.

But here’s the thing. We DO have time. Time is, in fact, all we have. This time, this minute. There is no guarantee about what comes next. Take your minute - one or two or nine million, however many you’re lucky enough to be given. Sit down and savor them.

Why worry so much about having it all, when really, you already do?

Feed your dog from your hand.

Breathe.