Writers need respite from words. After a day of wordsmithing, I need to escape the linear chute of language into other symbol systems, other frames of knowledge, other mindscapes and creativities. I’m fine with images or with a film or television program where words may come towards me but require little in return of language.
My body needs to be refreshed from the postures of writing as well. There aren’t that many postures of writing so it usually means sitting. Sitting at my desk is not awfully different from sitting at a café table or holding my notebook on my lap in the living room. I suppose I could get a kneeling chair or write standing up as Virginia Woolf was said to do. If I am the reincarnation of VW (another story), I should take a look at this option (and stay away from rivers).
Walking, gardening, cooking, quilting, and tai chi are my favored relief activities when I am exhausted mentally or physically by hours of scribbling or clicking away at one or another of my keyboards. If I were a musician, I can imagine that playing my oboe or guitar or piano would be another release from the garments of prose.
Walking delivers a cool, refreshing shower of sensory droplets. I see the house with new owners change slightly day by day, smell the tiny white blossoms on this hedge and that, notice the uneven sidewalk blocks and don’t trip, feel the air under this heavy shade, pump thigh muscles with oxygenated blood, suck in that belly, feel a stretched spine reaching for the sky, and more.
Walking is also a meditation on the world outside my head. Writing pushes at my skull from the inside, as if something is trying to get out. Walking equalizes the pressure by exposing me to exterior stimuli: other people, scenery, traffic, little scenarios transacted within my view, wall murals, public buildings, public services, costumes, disguises, and temptations. I step outside my front door and enter the pages of Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? or Richard Scarry’s What do People Do All Day? There is so much bright color and high contrast some days and so much mystical haze other days.
Walking brings worms into my field of vision. I don’t need to see worms slowly drying on the sidewalks every day, but if I didn’t ever see them at all, how much less I would know about my own environment. Like witnessing the death of worms, I see other peripheral stories abandoned in the grass or perambulating through my slice of world. Today it’s a red plastic bat dropped on a side lawn and a man in a white sports jacket entering a cafe. I could pause to reflect on the stories that murmur around them in a tempting nimbus, but then I would be writing!
Walking brings me face to face with the dilemmas of eye contact and greeting strangers. I don’t have a predetermined strategy, so it is a new decision to be made twenty times (or more) on a typical walk. Unlike the confusion of greeting strangers, a clear advantage of walking is spontaneous conversations with neighbors hanging out clothes or planting hosta in a shady corner garden. The threads of neighborhood are spun into fabric by such encounters.
Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole” is one way to sum up the experience of walking. This is an excerpt.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Everyone gardens for their own reasons, too. I garden to keep the wilderness at bay. I’m not even sure that what I do out there can properly be called gardening anyway. I believe that in a past life I was a machete-toting bushwacker of some sort. I have this imagined quest going on inside my head while I am weeding or clearing overgrown brush. Just the very word, quest, feels resonant to me as if Quetzalcoatl was my middle name and jungle was my game.
My “gardening” habit is typically neglect for two or three years while I am writing intensively, and then a year of hacking my way through prolific vines and sharp thorny hedges with sharp tools. I may have fallen and impaled myself on a crude prototype of these tools in one of my lives because I am vividly aware of the potential piercing power of the blades I am holding during battles with sinuous woody serpents.
While sweating and ripping and shredding in my little swath of wilderness, I am in constant conversation with the invasive species. I compliment them on their cleverness of disguises, on their audacity in climbing my house, and on their innocence in being marked for death or disruption when they may have tremendously valuable, but unknown, properties. This activity, taken in small doses after hours at the keyboard, is refreshing and salutary. In larger doses, it might be deemed psychotic. I shower immediately afterwards because poison ivy is flourishing this year.
Cooking might seem to be a merely domestic activity, especially when a woman works at home. To me it is a primitive pleasure. I’ve seen amateur chefs labor for hours with numerous, costly ingredients to present a fluffy, complex amuse bouche that barely skims the taste buds. This isn’t my refreshment of choice after a day of writing. I am restored and rebalanced by chopping and stirring. Risotto, jambalaya, or soup is the best holiday from vocabulary I can imagine.
Quilting is my newest reprieve from hours of lexical maneuverings. I get up from my desk chair at one end of the house and walk to the dining room table at the farthest end where a cornucopia of colors and shapes revives my eyes.
My tools of quilting are so completely different from my tools of writing! What a relief to pick up a rotary blade or a long, cool plank of ruled plastic. The numbers I use don’t beg to be strung together or manipulated; they just want to be obeyed in their most literal sense, no connotation or interpretation allowed.
After working in black and white all day, I am a big fan of purple and red with turquoise trim. Just looking at the juxtaposition of contrasting batiks on my table reminds me of those little Smarties candies, a burst of sugar and flavor right where you need it.
I love the little pieces of fabric spread like gems under the dining room chandelier. They are real; they have textures and shapes. I actually made them with my own hands and I will touch them again to make more out of them.
Like writing, I suppose, these humming bits of excitement will become more meaningful as they are joined with other little bits. The sum will be greater than the parts. But where the protocols of writing impose a linear direction most of the time, these modest triangles, squares, and rectangles will be stitched together along all sides, forming multi-dimensional images, perhaps summoning up a foaming, surging storm at sea.
I can be exhausted by 7:00 p.m. and still turn to my colors and shapes and feel invigorated for two more hours of creativity on the other side of the house. Yesterday when I finished trimming tiny triangles from “little sister” squares within squares, I let the scraps flow through my fingers. What can I do with these fractures of the spectrum? I tossed big handfuls of light, color, and shape, for now, into the litter jar of thread and fabric clippings. Quilting is about deliberately making use of scraps, but where do we draw the line? Is it below an inch? Is it a single word?
Tai chi releases me from the compulsion of words through welcome silence and a shift to kinesthetic sense. Others in my class ask our teacher about where to put their left foot during a repulse monkey move, but I ask her, “What is in your mind when you are doing tai chi?” She tells me to focus on one of the six principles of loosened joints, slow continuous motion, moving against resistance, conscious weight transference, upright posture and alignment, and quiet mindful focus. Even the process of enumerating the six principles helps me relax out of the profusion of gushing language where I live most of the day. Gratefully, I move . . . slowly, continuously, against resistance, and with mindful focus . . . to keep things whole.
For Your Writing
Thinking about what we do as RESPITE from writing is not the same as figuring out what we do to AVOID writing. Make three lists: (1) what you are intending to write, (2) what you do to avoid writing, and (3) what you do as relief after writing. Pick one from each list and do them all today!
Quotation for Percolation:
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg
