Category: Big Thoughts
Thursday, Feb 26, 2015 | Adventure, Big Thoughts, Kids, Parenting, Spirit |
recorder concert, while we wait
Earlier this week, I walked the two little kids partway to school, the uphill part.
The tall snowbanks make the sidewalk narrow, so it’s hard to walk three abreast, which is what they want to do, each holding one of my hands. CJ tends to fall behind. He was hanging onto my hand, walking behind me, and I felt like I was pulling him along.
So I told them a story that I think is at least partially accurate. I’ll have to ask my dad, because it’s really his story. I remember him telling it to me when I was little. I loved horses and I loved stories about horses. In my memory of this story, Dad was living in Puerto Rico. He wasn’t very old, perhaps 7 or 8, and he had a little pony. Was the pony called Star? I could be making that up. I could be making all of this up, which is why I don’t trust myself to write a memoir. In the story, as I told it to my kids, my dad was riding his pony up a steep hill, and it got steeper and steeper as they got close to the top, so he got off and held onto the pony’s tail, and the pony pulled him up the rest of the way.
I told CJ that I felt like my dad’s little pony, pulling him up the hill.
Telling the story made our walk so much easier, not just for the kids, but for me too. It reminded me of my own power, as the adult in the situation, to change the tenor of an experience by introducing a creative element, such as a story.
When the older kids were little, we used to pretend things all the time when we were walking places–and we walked a lot of places, and we walked really slowly. So it took patience, and in all honesty, I am not a patient person by nature. It could have been really boring. But instead, we were in the arctic or the desert, we were explorers, the cars were polar bears, the streets were rivers of ice, we were going up mountains, we were looking for our home, it was really cold, or really hot. The story would expand, mostly just describing what we were doing; sometimes we were hiding or hurrying from an imaginary threat. It turned our walks to the library or school or on errands into little adventures. We had to be doing these things, and yet we were enjoying doing them—the errands became bigger than what they appeared to be, on the surface. It’s something I’ve tried to pass along to my kids, to give them the tools to recognize and experiment with creative solutions to momentary problems: creative ways to overcome boredom, to soothe the self, to interact with others. (Whether it’s worked, I don’t know; my kids nevertheless seem to like best to self-soothe and fight boredom with a variety of glowing screens ….)
But this little uphill climb got me thinking about the power of a story. And the power of a storyteller. It’s also the power of play and imagination, two things I get to tap into regularly in my writing life as well as in my parenting life. I recognize that it’s a luxury–that play is a luxury and imagination is a luxury–because you have to have the patience and energy to locate and use your creative self. You have to know it’s there, in the first place. You have to trust yourself. But it’s a luxury anyone can afford, which is the only kind of luxury that really interests me, access to which I would love to somehow spread out into the world.
xo, Carrie
Monday, Feb 23, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Exercise, Kids, Meditation, Parenting |
icicles on Aggie
Daily meditation, in slightly increasing increments of time, has given me plenty to think about … even while I’m practicing standing a small distance away from my thoughts, trying to observe rather than control or judge them.
The thinking never really stops.
Here’s an observation applicable throughout the day, and in parenting situations too. The physical state of the body greatly affects the mind’s ability to focus. Obvious? Yeah, I know. I spend a lot of time discovering the obvious. Or, more accurately, rediscovering the obvious. You’d think you’d remember all the wise and useful things you’ve learned, at great cost, over years of experience, right? Well, I don’t seem to. I need reminders.
Yesterday, I struggled to sit quietly for the full twenty minutes, and not only because I could hear my kids rolling around wrestling and mock-arguing in the next room. I struggled because it had been a morning without much activity. I’d snuggled a grumpy kid in bed, read the paper, eaten breakfast, sipped a coffee. All was ease and leisure. And then I sat down to meditate and my body, it turned out, was flaring with unshed energy. I hadn’t noticed! If I’d noticed anything, I would have said I was feeling a bit grumpy or anxious—I would have interpreted my physical state as being a state of mind, as if the two were quite separate.
Those twenty minutes felt endless. I was crawling out of my skin with wanting to get up and move.
This morning’s meditation, by contrast, felt easy. I was alert, steady, and twenty minutes flew by, so quickly that I couldn’t believe it was already over. The difference being quite simple, I think: this morning I got up early, and exercised. My body, by the time I sat down to meditate, had shed plenty of energy and was prepared for quiet and stillness, and therefore my mind was capable to quiet stillness too. This is more than enough reason to get up early and exercise, in my opinion. (I set my alarm for 5-ishAM, five mornings a week, and for that habit to stick, I need a good reason, frankly.)
I applied my new-found/re-found observation yesterday when the kids were practicing their instruments. The six-year-old was getting frustrated and impatient, so I sent him running a loop around the house—once, and then twice—pretending to time him. (Side note: funny how much he loves being timed for activities; maybe the opportunity to lay down a “best time,” no matter how arbitrary, is endlessly exciting.) Anyway, after setting a new course record, he sat back down at the keys, panting a bit, but with a much happier spirit. Same for the nine-year-old violinist. (She didn’t need to be timed, however.)
It made me appreciate that three out of four kids walk to school every morning, and the fourth kid usually gets up to do some exercise before breakfast.
Makes me ask, too: How often is our physical state affecting our mental state, and we’re completely unaware?
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Meditation, Spirit |
six-year-old asks the big questions on the chalkboard wall
I’m thinking of not trying to be the best at everything.
I’m thinking of cutting myself some slack, maybe a whole lot of slack.
I’m thinking of what my inner life would look like, were I to celebrate my successes, and accept my failures.
I’m thinking of exploring even more closely the work that comes naturally to me.
I’m thinking of not wishing I were better at [fill in the blank].
I’m thinking of letting myself attempt things for which I have no discernible talent.
I’m thinking of taking pleasure in the wonders of life as it exists right now. Right now!
The sound of a garbage truck idling outside the house. The icy blue sky. The brightness of sun on deep snow. My feet in warm socks chilly against one another, toes touching. Life. Breath. The way my kids head boldly out the door every morning to take on the world in their own brave ways. The way my kids crash through the door every afternoon and shout a greeting, Hey Mom! Are you here? The ebb and flow of multiple conversations washing over me. The smell of dirty hair and of clean hair.
I’m thinking of frightening things that have no good answers and I’m thinking of prayer and of love.
I’m thinking of how brief I am. I’m thinking of the spaces within myself. I’m thinking of atoms and of stars.
I’m thinking of how much I like hanging around laughing and talking about stuff that doesn’t matter, that has no substance, that is lightness itself, utterly irreverent, in moments that mimic forever.
I’m thinking about not being the best, or even distinguished, or even accomplished, or even any comparative description at all. I’m thinking about being.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Feb 13, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Meditation, Poetry, Reading |
〉 A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, by Mary Oliver
bought on impulse from Amazon when shopping for photo albums for Christmas gifts
* Mostly, I just want to give you quotes from this book, which is wonderful. It’s slim, precise, measured, and deeply practical: a book about the poetic craft, with useful examples to illustrate the vocabulary necessary to discuss a poem. If I teach again, I will have my students buy and read this book. I am only sorry I’m so late in finding it. Here is a taste.
I was drawn to this section because she speaks of meditation. It is a different way of looking at the practice:
“We experience the physical world around us through our five senses. Through our imagination and our intelligence, we recall, organize, conceptualize, and meditate. What we meditate upon is never shapeless or filled with alien emotion—it is filled with all the precise earthly things we have ever encountered and all of our responses to them. The task of meditation is to put disorder into order.”
Oliver is a believer in patience and will, time spent in honest labour. She quotes Flaubert: “Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.” She says:
“What a hopeful statement! For who needs to be shy of any of these? No one! How patient are you, and what is the steel of your will, and how well do you look and see the things of this world? If your honest answers are shabby, you can change them. … You can attend to them, you can do better … When people ask me if I do not take pleasure in the poems I have written, I am astonished. What I think of all the time is how to have more patience, and a wilder will—how to see better, and write better.”
How to have more patience, and a wilder will….
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Feb 10, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Poetry, Writing |
A friend asked if I’m writing a poem every day, as intended. And no, I’m not. Mostly, right now, I’m journalling in a more traditional sense. But every once in awhile, yes, a poem comes along when it might not have before, had I not been considering the possibility of writing a poem every day. Here’s one I like. I wrote it on the bench outside my kids’ piano lessons, with two of them clamouring for snacks. So note to self — there’s no excuse, no reason not to try to write or to create absolutely anywhere.
Note to self
To write is to fear
Is to write against the fear, into it
Is to let the fear hover, to hold it while it vibrates
Like a trapped bird
To write is to be spurred by fear
Sent by fear, pressed by fear deeper into the woods
Not to go into hiding, but to seek what you’re tracking
To write is to track, not to hunt
Is to follow your quarry through dangerous terrain
Is to be wrong, dying on the wrong path
Thirsty and hungry and tired and wrong
To write is to meet your imperfect self
In an argument about annihilation, uselessness
To write is to find
In the woods on the wrong path
Your self crouched in the thicket
Watching this strange animal move
Like nothing you’ve ever seen before
Nothing you could have imagined
And you are trying to write its name
You are trying to send news of this animal home
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jan 30, 2015 | Big Thoughts, Word of the Year |
“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness – an empathy – was necessary if the attention was to matter.” — Mary Oliver, Our World
