The sum of everything
Posted on | December 28, 2009 | 15 Comments
I don’t have words. I don’t know where they’ve gone, except maybe with the dark speckled starlings, lifting off all at once from the snow flocked trees, their calls filling the silent air with abrupt, heady sound before they are gone and the fat fluffy flakes fill the impressions in the snow where their feathered bodies fluttered, fighting for crumbs.
In a moment, nothing is left of them: no memory of their stark, dark wings except my own. The bird feeder swings empty. The snow falls. This might be how a year passes, or an afternoon. This is how moments add up now, recently, without words.
So I have begun to paint again.
In the absence of words, color looms large. A particular hue of blue finds its way into almost everything: like an undertow, or the drone of a bagpipe, like something I cannot name. I paint it everywhere, almost accidentally. I’m even thinking of painting it on my dining room chairs, this color that is my soul now, at the edge of a new year, after a year of limbo, of growing, of patience, of wondrous birth of my smallest boy.
Natalie Goldberg says to go, right now and write. She says to go and write as practice, and maybe it is time that I return to this, here. Maybe there is nothing more than this in the spaces between productivity as my novel consumes me, then falls silent like the snow, like the starlings, like the quiet surprise of winter making everything the most delicate hues of white imaginable, until I want to curl aroundthe almost-ache of my own wonder at it’s whiteness.
How can there be anything but this moment? This snow, this quiet throbbing of my own embering heart at the start of winter?
This is where I am now, looking to and fro and trying to remember. What has this year been? I have everything and nothing to show for it: the accomplishments that are mine are small and enormous, both. A baby boy, a 7 minute mile, the shambles of a novel, the wonderment that we’re still here, barely, after a doozy of a year financially.
Who are we, who are not great or famous? What is the sum of lives that go by unimaginably small, like the mark left by the starlings in the snow? Except for this: inside my mind now, the world expands like bellows by a smithy’s hearth. I hold wonder. I hold fire. I hold prayer, and promise.
Who are we, who are not great, but are blessed with snow and small boys and warm bread and starlings? Across the world, and also seven miles away, someone is hungry. There are boys who stay awake at night shooting phantom villains on video games they do not understand, then come to school tight-fisted, angry, saying: “I’ll shoot you,” and meaning it in the stark, hungry way that only they can. And there are people heading up the corporation that is stealing the seeds of a biodiverse world and making them limited, presice, ingenious, terminating, so that entire populations become destitute and indebted.
Who are we, who are not great, who touch softly the cheeks of our sleeping children, feed chickens corn, paint when words don’t come? Who are we if not everything at once?
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December 28th, 2009 @ 10:31 pm
Thank you, once again, for sharing your gift of words… expressing the subtleties of human existence with its inevitable angst so eloquently…
December 28th, 2009 @ 11:12 pm
I always read your posts but I love this one. I love the painting…I could honestly write so much *love* about this post.
“Who are we, who are not great and famous?”—that is remarkable. And it sums up how I feel a lot of the times. How I know nothing would change if I were on the other side.
December 28th, 2009 @ 11:32 pm
Seems to me you have just enough words and all the right ones at that. Beautiful.
December 28th, 2009 @ 11:59 pm
Love your paintings…use of palette knife, no?
December 29th, 2009 @ 12:26 am
beautiful, words and images. this post will be with me for some time friend.
December 29th, 2009 @ 12:35 am
I agree with Misti about the “remarkable” quote. It is powerful indeed. You know what else is remarkable? That you are thinking that the words are not there, yet I come here and am romanced by your words. They are stronger and more powerful than ever, and they are relevant. They speak to those of us who are not great and famous…although, just because you are not famous does not mean you are not great. I am so lucky that I found this space. Your words help me grow in so many ways. And, your paintings? Beautiful. I know that the winter season has been hard for you in the past, but I hope you re-read this post and see how talented of a writer you are~and I really want to hear how your November Novel Writing went! xoxo
December 29th, 2009 @ 2:35 am
your paintings are as awe-inspiring as your words {which are beautiful, haunting & quotable}.
i agree – this is how we all feel at times; so very small, and yet, somehow all connected.
December 29th, 2009 @ 7:29 am
I see no shortage of words or moment-perfect sentiments here! You are a smith of such things and even when you think there are no words you are weaving a tapestry like Tennyson’s Lady. It all matters, and yet, it all disappears.
I’m so grateful for this moment, here with you.
December 29th, 2009 @ 2:59 pm
Wow. Again and again, you amaze me with your perspective and how you express yourself. I cannot comprehend how you can say you don’t have words! There they are, and there and there. I know you are writing a novel, and maybe that is what you mean: you are blocked, novel-wise. But you do have words. This post is proof of that.
Maybe you are simply percolating on the novel. Keep at it. The words will come.
I admit, it’s hard not to envy how easy you make writing look. I wish you that ease, and I wish you patience with the muse. Thank you for what you write. It is a gift to me.
December 29th, 2009 @ 7:27 pm
I am simultaneously shamed that I am not just writing. Just opening up and letting it come, and at the same time: exhilarated with each word I read of the words you write: pummeled with beauty.
December 29th, 2009 @ 8:22 pm
Liz: no, no, no! You can never feel shamed… you inspire me over and over again to keep this record.
December 29th, 2009 @ 10:05 pm
“pummeled with beauty”, I like that. You bring so much to the world with your writing. Thank you from all of us.
First novels are years in the making, yours will come when the time is right. I suspect it will ebb and flow until then. In the meantime, how inspiring that you are painting. And how lucky are your boys to have your creativity, wonder, love bringing them up in the world.
December 30th, 2009 @ 12:48 am
Your words nourish us.
December 30th, 2009 @ 2:05 am
Even in this post, you made art… and I’m talking about your words AND your pictures. In fact, would you ever consider selling some of your paintings? I know I would just LOVE to hang one of those on my walls.
January 1st, 2010 @ 12:10 am
just beautiful.