THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF BEAUTY

One of my favorite walks in the Bay Area is right across the Golden Gate Bridge, in the Marin Headlands. As I hike up the steep wooded trail, to the top of Hawk Hill, raven’s croak and hawks soar overhead. The reward for this climb is a spectacularly sweeping view; on one side, the jewel box city that is San Francisco gleams like a silver Oz in the distance. 

On the other side, the wild rolling landscape of the Headlands meets the Pacific Ocean stretching on to the edge of the sky. In the afternoon light, sun stars dance on the water and the Farallon Islands hover mysteriously on the horizon. Standing and gazing out at the land, the water, the sky, never fails to deeply move me and fill me with both a sense of complete peace and profound awe. I cannot imagine anything more beautiful.

 

It is this experience of beauty that most often catches my attention when I am out wandering and is what draws me back to the landscape time and time again. Now, I know that beauty is one of those words, like love and friendship, that has gotten watered down in our culture from casual use, leaving us with impoverished sense of what these words mean. But the essence of the meaning is just as important as it ever has been.

The experience of beauty can come from many sources; the beauty in nature, a beautiful painting, an exquisitely moving poem, a gorgeous musical passage, the taste of a fresh peach, the beauty in an act of great kindness. These experiences move us and change us by affecting us at a very deep level. True beauty, I believe, has transformative power. It can be a threshold that takes us from one place to another—from hurt to healing, from famished to nurtured. The experience of beauty can summon not only great joy but deep sorrow—it works like a probe that brings all kinds of emotions up from the deepest place.

I recently listened to an interview with the late Irish poet, John O'Donahue, where he discussed his thoughts on the inner landscape of beauty. He said that we feel most alive in the presence of what is beautiful, and that beauty enables the heart and reminds us of what is infinite in us. He even talked about how the experience of true beauty can be an experience of homecoming. He asked listeners to think about what comes to mind when they close their eyes and visualize beauty, reminding us that beauty and glamour are not the same—that beauty isn't all about nice loveliness but about an immerging fullness, a greater sense of grace, a deeper sense of belonging.

Yes. That’s the experience I’m talking about.

So, what does this have to do with writing? When I am getting to know a character, one of the questions I always ask myself is, "What does he/she love?" Once I’m able to answer this question, I know so much more about who this person (character) is. I think two equally revealing questions might be, " What does she see when she closes her eyes and thinks of beauty?” And “How does the experience of beauty inform and change her?” They are questions I plan to incorporate in my future getting-to-know-you ritual.

O’Donahue reminds us that the root of the word beauty is the word calling. Beauty calls to us but also can remind us of our calling by evoking what moves us.

You can listen to the entire 51-minute interview with John O’Donahue at :

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/john_odonahue/

Take good care,

Sharry

The Landscape of Ritual

I have been thinking about rituals lately. I have quite a few of them in my life. Maybe we all do. I run, as you know, along the same river trail most mornings. I practice yoga once a week in the same studio with the same teacher and, most of the time, the same fellow practicers. I make pizza for dinner almost every Friday and our family plays Rat-a-Tat-Cat most weekends. (Awesome card game, if you don’t know it. Great for the whole family.)

Rituals are comforting. It feels good to do something familiar. My body can relax into it because it knows, instinctively what to do—downward dog or stretching pizza dough or whatever the movement may be—and so my mind can relax too. There is no thinking about the action, only doing it, and this frees me up to dream or imagine or simply let go.

But rituals also facilitate discovery. Because I run along the same river trail day in and day out, I notice when a tree has fallen or a fox has been by or the ice flow on the river has shifted. I can hone in on tiny new details because I am not taking in the entire landscape in that sweeping, wide-angle way I do when I am in it for the first or even second or third time. Rituals strengthen that observation muscle.

Alison McGhee explores this idea of the landscape of ritual in her Julia Gillian series, which I am reading with my eight year old daughter right now. Julia Gillian takes her dog, Bigfoot, on a walk through her neighborhood almost every day. They visit the same hardware store with the entertaining window display, the same house that leaves a bowl of water out for walking dogs, and the same bakery where Julia’s friend Zap works. This walk is safe and familiar. Julia could do it with her eyes closed. But the point is she doesn’t, right? She treks her route with her eyes wide open, and her head and heart open too. It is on these walks that she comes to solutions to her problems. And it is on these walks that she finds new objects or people or actions that become pivotal plot points. Alison does a gorgeous job illustrating how ritual—both in a character’s life and as a writer’s tool—can deepen a story and make it exceedingly more universal in its attention to detail.

I will leave you with that. Right now I am off to revise my picture book manuscript. Oh yeah. Revision is a ritual in my life too…

Tam

Out of The Fog

Fog is a living part of the San Francisco landscape. It's a year-round naturally occurring phenomenon that follows a predicable pattern; whenever the temperature warms up around us, it pushes the fog in. Or as Carl Sandburg said, it comes in on little cat feet. We tell ourselves that we love the fog. It’s cool and moist and mysterious. It softens edges and muffles sound. It has been a seductive muse to many writers, musicians and painters. Mark Twain actually did not say ‘the coldest winter I’ve ever spent is a summer in San Francisco,’ but we love to repeat the misquoted sentiment anyway.

A few days ago, I took a walk around Stow Lake, where a low, thick fog had shrouded much of the landscape, erasing Strawberry Hill—the island in the middle of the lake. I could hear the rhythmic lap of oars dipping in and out of the water, but when the boatman came rowing out of the fog, it felt like a vision. Like magic. Like he appeared out of nothing.

When the fog comes into the bay, Alcatraz vanishes. As if it isn’t there anymore. I’ve heard visitors say, “What happened to Alcatraz? I thought it was out there in the Bay?” I reassure them that it’s still there and I do know that it is, yet I always experience a sense of relief when it peeks out of the top of the fog bank. Ahh—there it is. See?

I learn life lessons every day; quite often they come from the landscape around me. There is a very steep hill a few blocks from my house—so steep that when you drive to the crest, you cannot see the road in front of the hood of the car. When my girls were young, they would beg me to drive home that way and then we’d all shriek as we went over the summit and I swear, that as many times as I did it, there was always a moment of Oh Sh—! doubt that we are about to plunge off a cliff.

Like a person who wanders in the fog, I used to be a complete pantser—someone who writes by the seat of her pants. I would get a vague idea for a character and a situation and then just start writing to see where it went. It was an act of faith, like driving over the crest, trusting that the road would come up to meet me. And it did (although I wrote a lot of plot-less fiction that way.) In the past few years, I’ve tried to be more of a plotter. A planner. I find I like having a map that shows me where I’m going.

But still, there are times when the fog comes in and even with a road map, I can’t see where I’m going. It’s scary and takes an act of faith to push forward. Slowly, I’m learning to trust my sense of direction again, that if I continue to take careful steps forward, I will find the road. Alcatraz is still there. When the words do appear, they’re like that boatman rowing out of the fog, ferrying an unparalleled thrill and reminding me that writing is magic.

Sharry

Ice

This week was one of the iciest yet this winter. A sequence of rain, then freezing cold temperatures, then a warm spell, then more rain and freezing cold temperatures again is the perfect recipe for ice. We used to live in a house at the top of a long, steep hill and when this kind of weather came sweeping in we would have to literally put on ice climbing shoes and bring out our ice picks in order to sand the driveway. If we lived there this week we would have been in our climbing gear for sure. And I would have been in a state of body-trembling anxiety. I was so afraid of that driveway when it was icy. I will never forget the one morning I went out to start the car to warm it up, went back inside to get the kids ready to go, and when I came back the car was down the driveway, across the road, in a ditch. Thank goodness no cars had come. Thank god I hadn’t put the kids in the car yet. I still shudder thinking about it.

So I don’t have a great relationship with ice.

But yesterday was a run day for me. And Kara and I weren’t going to be deterred by the weather. We donned our yak-traks and headed out onto the trail. Sheer and total ice. It reminded me of one of those old-fashioned ice skating scenes in Holland, maybe, with winding frozen rivers. Kara and I had to run along the side of the trail. Any step on it would have resulted in both of us on our tails. I know this because the dogs did slip and really fell on theirs. And even the sides of the trail were icy. I had to keep my eyes on my feet the entire time I was running.

(We did stop, though, at the part of the trail that winds right on the edge of the river and just looked out at the sparkling wide swath of ice and the blue-pink sky above it. It felt like some other magical landscape just beyond our reach.)

I initially felt that fear that I always feel when I’m worrying about falling; when I am sure, at any moment, I am going to lose control. But as I ran—as I continued to focus on my feet, and as the unusual silence between Kara and me opened itself up to the sound of ice cracking on the river, the clicking of the dogs’ toes on the frozen ground and the rush of the wind—I began to get into a rhythm. My feet, my breathing, and my head all came together in a sort of running meditation. I was fully in the moment, fully in my body, and not afraid at all.

The first thing Kara said to me when we finished the run was, “That was hard but it was kind of like a meditation and I began to love it…” How amazing that we had shared the same experience without ever communicating during it. Did one of us inspire it in the other? Did the landscape inspire it in both of us?

Whoever it was the helped me transform my fear into joy, I thank you.

I hope you all find a transformative moment this week. I don't have a book recommendation this time around but maybe you can find that moment in a book you are reading, or maybe in your own creative work.

Tam

Mining the Darkness

I wanted to dove-tail a bit on Tam’s post last week—the weight of the kinds of darkness she described have been tangibly with me these past days despite the extraordinarily lovely weather we have been savoring for most of January here in the Bay Area (many of us feel guilty about enjoying it so much when a great deal of the Northern Hemisphere is steeped in dreariness. Plus we need the rain. Still, it’s hard not to look out the window each morning and cheer; Hooray! Sunshine and blue skies again!)

Yes, light does offer a sense of possibility, of curiosity, of hope and we, as human beings, are drawn to it, even long for it. We wait through the darkest hour for the break of dawn. We feel nourished by light’s myriad of forms and many relative states from sunshine to candle light, from the light promised in the word enlightenment to a lightness of spirit. It also refers to a sense of humor—of not taking ourselves quite so seriously all of the time. Which can be a very good thing, especially when you’re a writer approaching another revision with trepidation. Lighten up! The worst you can do is make a mess!

I have been wondering, then, why I so often find myself drawn to darkness: the darker stories, dark humor, themes of darkness, images that suggest a dark undertone? Perhaps because I move in a landscape filled with light, I sometimes long for the darkness—the yang in the yin. But really, I believe it’s because where light holds possibility, curiosity and hope, darkness cradles mystery, suspense, the unknown. Darkness holds a treasure-trove of riches—secrets live in the shadows, spirits suggest themselves in cool unlit spaces; neither can survive in bright daylight. And transformation most often happens in darkness.

A few days ago, I found myself at SF MOMA, drawn by an image in the newspaper, a photograph by the late Francesca Woodman—a mysterious self-portrait of the artist disappearing between the fireplace mantle and the wall.

The show spans the short life-time of her work, from a teen until she died at age twenty-two. Even if you didn’t know that she had jumped to her death from a Manhattan loft window, you sense that this precocious artist had one foot in another world. Her images are haunted, filled with mystery, mesmerizing. Many defy gravity, evoking a sense of slipping away. Others suggest a melding of the elements. All are infused with a melancholy sense of longing and loneliness that I found recognizable and deeply moving.

As I left the museum and walked back toward my car through the dappled light of the Yerba Buena gardens, I felt changed by the experience. I realized that not only had I been longing for this taste of darkness, but that it needed a stronger presence in the story I have been working on—my story lacked some of the necessary darker tones to balance out the light. Without proper shading, there is no definition, no contrast. Darkness is a rich source of tension, an essential element in all art forms. Without it, we risk a kind of overexposed blindness.

So my assignment over the next few weeks is to seek out pockets of darkness hiding in my story and to mine them for the mysteries and secrets that they horde. 

Sharry

In Darkness and In Light

Winter in Vermont is dark. My alarm wakes me up at 5:50 in the morning, and my 4 year old daughter (who has often managed, at some point, to crawl into bed with me) opens her eyes and says, “But it is still night.” And I can’t help but agree with her. It is pitch black outside, and every cell in my body wants to fold back in on itself and sleep.

On many days, it doesn’t get much better even when the sun finally (and technically) comes up. The clouds cover the sky with a dark grey curtain. Even the air seems dark, like you are walking behind the lenses of an enormous pair of sunglasses.

The landscape of darkness is fatiguing. In its vast and seemingly endless sameness—no visible contours, no rises and falls, no shades of color—it is tough to find a sense of possibility. Of curiosity. Of hope.

But of course darkness—like all things—is relative. Vermont may be dark, in my opinion, but I don’t live in the…oh…Arctic Circle, for example, where it is dark for months at a time, and I haven’t been buried beneath the steel and plaster and wood of a hospital that has fallen in an earthquake.

Uh, what?

In Darkness, by Nick Lake, is about just this. A young Haitian boy is trapped beneath the ruins of a hospital after an earthquake. Darkness surrounds him so thoroughly that he can’t tell if his eyes are opened or closed. He is trapped and hurt and unsure whether he will ever be rescued, and it is from this unimaginable place that he tells his confessional story—how he ended up in the hospital, what life is like in brutal Site Soley, and what led him to do the violent things he did—it is also from this out-of-reality place that his life becomes entwined with the life of the revolutionary slave-turned leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, who himself, in the end, wound up in a small, dark, trapped space.

The story of these two—one present day boy and one historical man—is tough to read. Every page is full of pain and despair, lives on the edge of destruction, blood and bones and a relentless, haunting, eye-opening commentary on the world in which we live. Talk about no sense of possibility, or curiosity, or hope. And yet—well, I won’t say. You’ll just have to read the book.

But, what I will say is that this book gently guided me back to the truth about darkness. If there is darkness, there is light. Somewhere. Coming soon. Or just a hint is already visible. Over there. And there. And, look, way over there. Just this morning, I picked up my daughter in my arms and pointed out the kitchen winter at a streak of pink light emerging from the darkness of the early morning. It was gorgeous. It was hope.

Happy New Year.  May it be filled with light.

Tam

A Good Guide

There is a walking meditation I do almost everyday; it begins a block or two into my morning walk. My footsteps keep time with the rhythm of the words as I start with, “Bless this day for me and mine, Great Spirit, Radiant Light of The Universe, Mother of us all, Father of us all, grant me grace.”

There are many parts of this meditation, but the central focus is gratitude—giving thanks for the many, many blessings I have in my life; family, friends, the companionship of animals, health. The teachers and guides, past, present and future who help and have helped me navigate the sometimes rocky shores; without their help, I surely would have lost my way time and time again. Their lessons come in many forms, from hand holding over the long voyage of a big project to simply handing me a book and saying, “Here, read this.”

One such book suggested to me recently was Frank Cottrell Boyce’s THE UNFORGOTTEN COAT, a story not only sweetly charming and highly enjoyable, but thought provoking and meaningful. Two brothers from Mongolia dropped into the foreign world of Liverpool assign Julie, the narrator in Year Six, as their official Good Guide, to show them around their New World and to protect them from the demon they believe is trying to make them vanish. The concept of a Good Guide struck me as an excellent one and set me to thinking in detail about all of the Good Guides I have had in my life; Bishop John who led our questing youth group on numerous backpack trips in the Cascade Mountains when I was a teenager, Carolee Davis who folded me into her life and guided me with her friendship, the amazing mentors at Vermont College who helped me start down the path to being the writer I continually strive to be, the incredible writers in my writing community who teach me patience, courage and tenacity every day, who remind me I am a writer, who help keep me from vanishing. For it’s easy to feel yourself vanishing when you lose faith in or forget who you are.

 

The story also made me think about my own opportunities to be a Good Guide, as teacher, parent, friend. I have very big shoes to fill and I’m not sure I can ever completely live up to the excellent guidance I have been blessed with, but it feels like it’s a good goal to start out the New Year. We can all be Good Guides, whether it be taking the time to listen to a neighbor’s worries, giving directions to a lost tourist or asking a student the right questions that will help her discover the truths in her own story.  

And as Julie learns in THE UNFORGOTTEN COAT, being a Good Guide can change the way you see your own familiar world, it can give you a new appreciation for what you take for granted.

 

So, Happy New Year from one aspiring Good Guide to all of you who have inspired me.

Sharry