Dirt Chic

Quote Time: Start Helping

I've got a little notebook I write spiritual quotes in.  I've sort of neglected it recently, and am working my way back into using it daily.  There are some things in it I'll be posting now and then.

"So how do we feed and nourish our spirit, and the spirit of others?  First find a path, and a little light to see by.  Then push up your sleeves and start helping.  Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or the Buddha can help you." -Anne Lamott, from Plan B

Let me just say, I hope to be as funny as Anne Lamott. :)  She is awesome.

Meditations: Feeling a Little Smote

It's morning, and I'm sitting in my chair, looking at my mass of books around me, thinking about getting dressed.  Am also thinking about where I got a huge amount of my stuff - thrift stores.

I thrift because it's fun for me.  I thrift because I've gone a long time without buying new clothes, and it has affected me - when I was younger, it was an obsessive desire of mine, to buy new clothes, and they were always too expensive, because I was always broke.  But I bought them anyway.  It amazes me how much I would spend on just one garment - $30 for a skirt?

I am more frugal than I sometimes realize, and conversely, I am a spendthrift who has a thing for texture, history, and small collections.  I have a complex relationship with items.  By complex I mean I am not a fan of people who will negatively and easily dismiss this relationship.  I'm not saying I'm always justified.  But I want to know why I do or do not do things - just because; but also, so that I can change when I recognize a problem.

Anyway.  

Japan.

The devastation keeps bringing up something for me that has been gnawing at my brain for a few weeks now - sacrifice and compassion.  I've had another complex battle this last year, with my faith, and I've recognized that amongst a few other key components (more on that some other time), my spiritual life hinges upon those two things.  (Yes, I just wrote "upon".)

I know a lot of people are justifiably disgruntled or downright hostile towards American Christianity.  I know a lot of people are disgruntled or downright hostile towards people who are disgruntled or hostile towards American Christianity.  I am not professing my total theology here, and I'm not rabble-rousing, but I was reading Isaiah 58:4-14 this morning, and it punched me in the face with its summative take on the relationship between sacrifice and compassion.  

At the very least, it reminds me to loose myself of the desire to collect and contain, to minimize in my heart the desire to always feel full and satisfied and comfortable.  It is a benefit of having dwelled on this in the past, in that I know that - as this passage subtly says - to give, to sacrifice, creates something new in absence.

So anyways.  I don't need to buy anything for myself for a good, long while.  As I am still broke, and should remember how much I have, and how little others have, in devastation and otherwise.  I'm not saying this to make anyone else feel smote. :)  It's just where I'm at in my head.  

GETTING to Work: More of the Same

Today's thoughts are brought to you by procrastination.  Not the lazy kind, but the gearing-up kind.  I have to tackle editing an essay, my extended screenplay treatment, and a study guide that will inform my students as to why they are being asked to analyze plays.  I also have to exercise.  And in that case, I'm just being lazy.  But at least I have my "outfit" on.  No, I'm not taking a picture.  

Today's thoughts, and this last week's thoughts, have turned especially to pursuing craft vs. pretty much everything else.  I go through periods where I don't write much - due, almost always, to busyness and other requirements.  I used to think I had to get my ducks in a row to begin writing.  I don't think that anymore.  But added to that, I also no longer think that certain things have priority over writing.  I've structured my life to write, on obvious and more subtle, complex levels, and to not write is to basically not exist.  Not to be dramatic or anything.  

This last summer I got plenty of writing done, but I had to fight for it.  And then I sort of lost the fight for awhile - depression, change, all that business.  But I clawed my way back up the mountain, so to speak.  I'm being vague, of course - so, in other words, I had some serious work to do, in terms of faith.  And by serious work I mean the excruciating process of putting one foot in front of the other.  Taking things one day at a time.  Writing is faith, for me.  (Not always vice versa, but for now, it's enough to say that writing is faith.)  If I don't believe in it, I can't do it.  

I came across this in my reading:

"You must know why you write, or else—if you take this picturesque path without knowing where you’re going you’ll lose your way and your gifts will destroy you." 

(Dorn in The Seagull)

Yay Chekhov. :) I want to put more quotes up here - ok, so I will.  Speaking of this summer's crisis, there is this interchange between two upper-class college-aged teenagers who are discussing what it will be like when they're older adults:

Jessica: Well, OK, whatever, but you’ll definitely be a completely different person.  Everything you think will be different, and the way you act, and all your most passionately held beliefs are all gonna be completely different, and it’s really depressing.

Warren: How do you figure?

Jessica: Because it just basically invalidates whoever you are right now.  You know what I mean?  It just makes your whole self at any given point in your life seem so completely dismissable.  So it’s like, what is the point?

Warren: I don’t really know about that…

Jessica: Well it’s true.

Warren: Maybe so, but I don’t really agree with it.

(This is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan) 

Up to a point, I would say, there you have it - it all is meaningless except for the part of me that says, I don't agree.  And Thank You, Warren, for your tiny act of faith, not against meaningless, but within it.

So, I've just had to first fight myself to even have the will to write.  And now, I feel a little bit like I have to fight the world.  I was watching Pollock the other day and Lee Krasner (in the movie) quotes Rimbaud:

"To whom shall I hire myself out?  What beast must I adore?

What holy image is attacked: What hearts shall I break?

What lie must I maintain?  In what blood tread?"

I don't quite feel that way about it, but at the very least, it's something worth repeating when I'm CRABBY and must vent.  :)

In summation... I've gotta figure out what I've gotta do, and then I have to do it, even when everything (including myself) feels like it's conspiring against me.  I hope, if you've read this far, that there is something in your own life - writing or otherwise - that you feel similarly about.  And I hope you don't find yourself in similar crises, but if you do, know that I know how it feels, and yes, it gets better.

Ok, and a final quote, from Long Day's Journey Into Night:

"The way to start work is to start work."

Enough procrastination. :) 

Some Lovely Things From Grandma Mitchell's.

It's good to think on love.

Influences, Part 3

When I think about the things I like best, the list either seems infinitely long, or excruciatingly short.  I feel like I like everything.  But when asked my favorite book, or even movie, I don't exactly draw a blank - but I either don't have something instantly in mind, or I have to deliberate over what precisely fits the bill.

Such as at adjunct faculty orientation last night - we all had to answer 6 questions about ourselves, such as what our favorite food is (uh, steak frites?), our most embarrassing moment (asking someone if they were pregnant when they weren't), hobbies (thrifting.  duh)....  Now, I've had a day to think about it, but when I thought about having to create a somewhat cohesive picture of myself for a group of strangers, I panicked ever so slightly.  And then everyone else went, because I was near the end of the circle.  And I was reminded of how extremely individualistic and postmodern our culture is, and no one seems to have the same interests, even when they have the same interests.  It was a free-for-all of tastes.  (Example of hobby: accordion-playing for 52 years.)

Anywho.  All that to say, while I like so very many things, not much makes the shortlist.  And the shortlist proves my individuality like whoa.  I should stop feeling bad that I haven't read Flannery O'Connor.  (Unless I should feel bad.)  Or have an extensive education in French film.  (Ok, maybe I should feel bad.)  

I am drawn to what I am drawn to.  Some things that I initially might not've been drawn to stick.  I'm grateful for those.  I just have to keep pursuing that which feeds into my... self.  However I encounter it.

This part of Influences falls directly under the heading of spirituality, though she could also fall mildly under the heading of writing - Anne Lamott.

I first tried to read her when I was 24.  Didn't stick.  I picked her up again this last year.  Majorly stuck.  

Anne Lamott, for me, is Christianity for when I can't wrap my head around certain cultural modes of "Christianity" anymore.  She's been what I can read when I can't read anything else on the subject of faith.  I find her extremely comforting - she's exquisitely up-front about how fricked-up her life has been.  I figure she isn't for everybody.  But I love it that she's around.  

She is also comforting at times, when I need a pick-me-up about writing.  Her chapter "Radio Station KFKD" in Bird by Bird is pretty much the best thing ever in describing insecurity.

Alright... I'm actually going to go now, and read Lamott.  (Might I mention that I've never read her fiction.  If you recommend, please let me know.  I'm a terrible fiction reader.  And no, I don't know my favorite novel offhand... ;)

Influences, Part 2

I would've tattooed this on myself, if it weren't so long.  Maybe I still will.  Or just a line (the first one... or 1.5).  It's indelibly etched on my mind/heart, though, so there's that.

ee cummings - next major influence next to ML'E (there is one before her but I'll talk about that later.  You could probably guess at who it is).  This poem is the alpha and omega of my theology:

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why,it is love;but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love's also there:
and being here imprisoned,tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds
(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep
cannot be photographed,measured;disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains...
-Who wields a poem huger than the grave?
from only Whom shall time no refuge keep
though all the weird worlds must be opened?
					   )Love

Influences, Part 1

My instructor this semester is challenging me to shape my own artistic manifesto... of a sort... I haven't had much trouble doing this.  No more trouble than I normally have, thinking my thoughts, watching my entire self morph into the next Thing that it pleases itself to be (and sometimes does not please itself to be).  Figuring it out as I go, but with the intent of connection.  I am grateful to not be a totally concrete, linear thinker.  (Though I am capable of such thought.  If I have to be. ;)

I was thinking about my thinking, especially, last week and this week - Cornerstone has a way of drawing out certain contemplations - and have been trying to pin down some of the bigger influences in my thinking.  It seemed a broad undertaking at first, but the longer I think about it, the more particular I find my influences to be.  A certain poem, a singular book - rarely an oeuvre by a particular person.  And the influences considerably shift, depending on the epoch....

The major exception to this, in the area of literature/writing, is Madeleine L'Engle.  And even then, I haven't read all of her writings - but I've been pretty hardcore about her nonfiction.

I started reading ML'E (my abbreviation for faster typing :) when I was 15.  Someone I babysat for lent me The Irrational Season (I still have it, and I'm not giving it back!).  I then became rather voracious about reading her adult fiction (along with the Wrinkle series), and worked a little bit more slowly through her non-fiction.  

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is one of my all-time favorite books.  I haven't re-read it recently.  I need to. 

 

The other books in the "Crosswicks Journals" (along w/Summer, are her more memoir-ish stuff) are wonderful (though I actually haven't finished Irrational - am working on that, now).  Circle of Quiet is generally about her writer's life.  Another one I need to re-read.

 

Two-Part Invention, about her marriage, kills.  Slays.  

 Walking on Water & Rock That is Higher (Story as Truth) are companions to each other, in my opinion.  I think Rock is a bit stronger, though I'm not sure why.  Perhaps I was feeling a bit stronger, mentally, when I read it.  They're both amazing.

***
Am I recommending her?  Depending on where you're at, of course.  I don't presume to know everyone's taste regarding nonfiction, or spirituality, but she's no lightweight, though she is not as heavy-handed as straight-up theology can be.  She's also just freaking awesome.  A few years ago I was spouting off some opinion to my dad, and I realized that I was completely ripping her off.  And that was awesome to me.  

...All of that DOES connect to my artistic manifesto... but now I'm tired... and want to go read Thornton Wilder.  So more on influences and such, later....