(01) S 04 22
beginning, in the middle
Nearly every morning for nearly a year now, I have written in a journal. It is a lined notebook from Midori, made in Japan. The first was a birthday present from my girls, purchased with their dad at the Mitsuwa market in Mar Vista, where we lived for many years when they were growing up, when he and I were still together, and then apart, before we moved to Ojai. I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood, pushing the stroller down Venice Boulevard, early morning breakfasts of crepes and lemonade and baskets of blueberries at the newly opened farmers market when the area was still considered sketchy. Not anymore.
That was then. And now we are in Ojai, and I am writing in a notebook from L.A., although technically, as I am now on my tenth one, the actual journal was shipped from Japan, or somewhere else in the Amazon multisphere. These notebooks suit me, the size, shape, line width and height. I like how they look lined up on my shelf, all full of words and thoughts and dreams and ideas. A record of this peculiarly strange and disruptive personal year, in the midst of the strange and disruptive collective pandemic.
When I describe this year, either to myself or to other people, when they ask how I’ve been and I have to try to tell them, I say this:
It’s been a rough year. In July, a long relationship ended with a person I had loved deeply. In August, a dear friend died unexpectedly, a bright, complicated, charismatic human who was gone too soon. And in September, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage 3 invasive ductal carcinoma.
Life changed, quickly and completely, although it also remained much the same. Like the pandemic, the onset brings shock and confusion; then fear, panic, anxiety, things happen and they are not in your control; then the sorting out, the research, the learning, the selection of a course of action; then adjustment; then the doing; then the living with what has changed you forever.
With big change comes the opportunity for clarity. Like a great storm shatters a landscape, shaking the trees and vegetation down to the strongest tendrils, gouging and making visible patterns and streams that had been covered and hidden, shocking circumstances strip you down to the foundation, leaving you vulnerable and bare. In that kind of moment, there is a great opening for self-awareness, for a reckoning. Sometimes the effects are subtle, invisible. Others more dramatic.
There is no walking away unscathed or unaltered.
At this moment, I am in my bed, writing, as I have for all these days of this past year. As I was recovering from treatment, I read an article about director Jane Campion. The interviewer asked her about her creative process. She said that when she is in the genesis phase of a film project, she stays in her bed for hours, sometimes all day, writing on pads and notebooks and sketching out storyboards, tossing them on the floor as she finishes them. Later, she will organize and use them as resources throughout the project. She described her bed as an island, immense and spacious, strewn with many pillows and throws. She stays on her island until her work there is done.
I have adopted that process, adapted it to my own. I have spent a lot of time on my Bed Island this year, dreaming and working and changing from the inside out, as my body adjusts and responds to the cancer treatments, as I try to process the changes inside and out, the reckoning of loss, the grief. Mourning what was, what might have been. Configuring what comes next.
I accepted the opportunity for clarity early on. When we say clarity we usually mean simply the quality of being clear, transparent, easy to see or hear or understand. This is an important aspect to have access to in a world suffused with noise.
The Latin meaning takes it a step further, a step back, to claritas, a state and quality of brightness, glory, splendor. Where to have clarity means not only being able to see or communicate clearly, but where clarity brings a lucidity and perspicuity that transcends the everyday. A brilliance of vision, of seeing - and this opens up ways of being that may have not seemed possible before, living, as we do, under all the noise.
I don’t know if i’ll post this. If I do, then you’ll be reading it, and know I’ll be happy and grateful you’ve taken the time. I’m not that interested in writing about myself here, per se - I have my Midori journals for that - but as a writing teacher my bread and butter is audience, purpose, context, and so this is a way of orienting myself to you, and you to me. I’ve thought about blogging since the thing of it first arose, started and stopped a number of times over the years, but my hesitation is always of adding to the noise. And social media gives me an allergic reaction these days. So in creating this website, I’m back to the blog. Thinking I’ll share cool stuff that folks are doing, document my process and conceptualizing a bit, even bring in scholarship from the academic side. Send off some messages in a bottle from Bed Island.