unweaving the nest

How to Subscribe to Unweaving the Nest Weekly...and Why :)

Not so long ago I received an email from a dear friend encouraging me to take some of the things I love and combine them into an online magazine. I looked at different options, different ways of publishing, researched the securest ways to offer subscriptions. I made long lists of things I would like to share, content that would be interesting, ways to make it interactive and even ways to have give-aways for my subscribers. After lots of planning and creating I have my magazine, Unweaving the Nest Weekly.

Here are just some of the things that we will be included in the image-rich issues:

• A feature story about something that I love that I think you might love, too.
• An inspirational essay, kind of like the things I've written about here on my blog since 2007.
• "The Last Straw" last-page essay from columnist Rick Ohler.
• Guest artists, poets, writers, photographers, chefs, and just plain old great people....
• Simple recipes that I have created. Fast, fresh and made with things you probably already have in your pantry and fridge.
• Candid interviews with interesting folks I'd like you to meet.
• Reviews of books I am reading that I believe are worth sharing.
• Poetry.
• Downloadable versions of my photographs that you can print or use as screensavers.
• Links to fabulous Web sites that I have discovered.
• Links to playlists I have created...music to discover and listen to, free, from your computer.
• and more!

It's kind of like a big love letter filled with things that inspire me, make me think, and that I want to share with YOU!

It takes time to put these things together, to create a beautiful presentation of them, to write and gather. Instead of putting ads on my blog, or filling the magazine with sponsor ads, I have decided to have a subscription rate and keep it to a minimal dollar amount. It's $4.00 per month, the cost of a fancy cup of coffee...and you get it once a week, for as long as you are a subscriber. It's easy to subscribe by clicking on this link and paying securely through Amazon.com. You will be billed automatically for $4.00 per month until you choose to unsubscribe. There is a link at the bottom of every magazine to easily unsubscribe.

If you would like to refer some subscribers to me, please send me an email at kateri.ewing at gmail.com. I have a special thank you gift for anyone who refers three friends that subscribe.

Unweaving the Nest Weekly celebrated its one-year anniversary, and is now onto the second volume of 52 issues. Here is a link to the one-year anniversary issue, where many readers sent in their comments about the first 52 weekly issues: CLICK HERE.

I sure hope you'll join us.

 

 

learning to see

It's time for another online poetry workshop. I hope you'll join us this time! I've made some additions and think it's going to be a fabulous seven week session. You can click on the link below to download a PDF flyer with the details. Here are a couple of comments from some of my students:

 

"If I were going to take a poetry writing class, or seek a personal coach for poetry writing, there is only one I would seek. Our region is so fortunate to have Kateri Ewing available to offer writing workshops. She has a rare depth and breadth of poetry writing experience as well as study behind her. Perhaps more important, from a student point of view, she is a gentle and wise teacher. She gives clear direction while remaining always constructive and supportive. Her guidance is not about her own style or views, but rather focuses on where the particular writer is coming from, so the result is that we students are better versions of our own writing selves. I base this recommendation not on direct experience with her poetry class but on direct experience in several writers' retreats and creative writing classes in which she has coached me."

Sally Cunningham ~ Non-fiction writer for the Buffalo News, Buffalo Spree Magazine, and Rodale Books, and fiction writing student. 

"I'd been writing for a few years, novels and short stories, but never anything so formal or formulaic as poetry. At least, that was how I thought of poetry.  And yet, each time I read a poem, I felt the urge to change it, 'correct' it, shorten it or change the words...  Finally, I decided I might as well try writing poems, myself.  I enrolled in Kateri Ewing's Online Poetry Workshop and I loved it.  Kateri is an expert in drawing out the inexperienced artist, coaxing the experienced writer into a better wordsmith and relentlessly pursing excellence with published authors and poets.  Her lessons are exciting and inspiring.  I discovered that learning to write poetry informed all of my writing, gave me a keen appreciation for reading poetry and opened a whole world of literature to me.  Whether you've been writing your whole life or you just have a nagging propensity to 'correct' everything you read, Kateri's class will give you the tools you need to become a poet."

Tess LoJacono ~ author of the forthcoming novel Milagros

 

Click on the link to open the flyer :)

Download Poetryworkshop

waiting out the weather

What a load of weather we've had here in Western New York. Rain, rain, rain. Makes me feel kind of melancholy after about the fifth day, and it looks like we've got a few more days of it ahead of us. I guess I shouldn't exaggerate; we've had some dry spells in the past week...but I can safely say that nothing hasdried. And today I am home with a chest cold and the damp chill is keeping me tucked in when I'd rather be out and about.

I do love the lushness that only rain can bring though. Try to find a cushion of moss (so green that it appears luminous) at the base of a tree in Albuquerque. I'm a moss kind of girl, so I do love rain...but I'm kind of feeling that enough is enough already. 

  A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.  ~ e. e. cummings 

Soon enough though, the rain will give way to snow, the lushness replaced by the revealing landscape of winter. I wonder if those of us who live our lives in a true four season location feel the ebb and flow of the emotional sides of seasons more strongly---the hopeful exuberance of spring, the fruitful abundance of summer, the slow dying off of autumn into the spare white of what can seem a very long winter. I know I do and it has an effect on the way I see things. I want to believe it's a healthy thing for the soul, to know such distinct climates of environment and spirit. I think it builds up a kind of penicillin of hope for when things get a little shaky. You start to know that when things are grim, just wait a little while and they will change. Winter always comes, but so does spring. Some people even say the best part of winter is imagining spring. I would say they're not far off, even though I can think of many other best things about winter.

It's interesting to me that the majority of my poems have been written in the winter months. Somehow, for me, the spareness of landscape and the drawing inward that comes with the colder months makes the poet in me more productive. Maybe it frees my imagination up? You know, to fill the spareness? I have not felt the need to write poetry for months and now it is beginning to come on strong again. And it's becoming obvious to me that it happens every year as sure as the day the migrant birds go missing and the sky grows dark by 5 o'clock.

It is also my time of dreaming. My desk and bedside table are beginning to pile with books that inspire, with hastily written notes in my journal of projects I hope to accomplish, but that I am just not ready to dive into yet. Oh, there are other kind of things, projects that need my attention now, but for the dreamier work of my creative self---I am holding out for the hush of snow, the long nights by the fire, the hours of aloneness I know await me. The silence and solitude of winter are for some reason my most creative time. Maybe if I lived in a more temperate place there would be a sort of balance of productivity throughout the year, but I think that the creative dry spells are necessary for me.

  My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. 

~ Pablo Neruda 

But all this rain...

If you think it's going to rain, it will. 

~Clint Eastwood 

There is nothing to be done about the rain. It might come for three more days whether I wish it or not. And the wish for sunshine? The sun is never so bright as when it shines on January's white fields. Just wait a little while....things will change.

 The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.  ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

looking closely

With all of this drawing and painting that I've been up to, I'm noticing how closely I tend to look at things. There is a quote that I love about a way of "seeing things." You can read over in my side bar, or I'll just paste it here:

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. ~John Constable

I find that to be very true. If I look long enough at just about anything, with my deepest attention, whether it's a doorknob, a grey rock among other grey rocks, the wasting carcass of a deer in the field,  or even the leftover peel of an orange...something happens. The detail becomes magnified, the textures, the subtleties of hue where there is light or shadow. Something stands out as beautiful. It never fails.

I don't know why I pay such close attention. Friends joke that if we take a walk together, by the time we are done I have taken a completely different journey than they have. Well, we all do that. Send anyone into a room with a table, a chair and a vase with flowers placed on that table and tell them to describe the room to you. You will get as many different versions as the people you ask. Each of us has our own way of perceiving things, and thank goodness! Otherwise there would be no reason to read literature, listen to music or enjoy a group of paintings at a museum: we would all produce the same old things.

To be a poet means that my number one job is to pay close attention and to make note of not only exactly what I see, but how I  see it. I imagine that is true for any kind of artist. This is why learning to draw will help me to be a better poet. As closely as I looked at things before, I never zoomed in quite like I have been in the past two weeks. :) And one other thing that I notice...I can forget to take a step back and see the big picture sometimes, and that can be a dangerous thing to neglect.

I stumbled upon this lovely, lovely video and wanted to share it here. There is so much to pay attention to in it. Simplicity is so rich in equisite detail...

work by any other name

 

I don't think I ever stop being a poet. It's not a hat that I wear, or cloak I try on from time to time. It's a way of being in the world, a way of living in the world with full attention and a desire to set down what I notice in a lyrical form. But the worrisome thing is that I don't always find the words for the things I desire to write down. If it was a hat that I put on I'm afraid I've misplaced it lately. But the desire, the way of seeing things, noticing...that never leaves.

And that sometimes creates a sense of longing, and of discord. So instead of abandoning it all together, I read. I draw inspiration and I learn more about my craft from those who have written before me, and with me. And I walk. I paint. I knit with beautiful, earthy wools. But I still feel that longing for the poem.

Every day.

I spent some treasured time with a friend today. He had some time without "work" and so did I. We sat side by side and did another kind of work. Not the kind that brings in the weekly paycheck, but it's just as valuable. Later during our time together I talked about how I don't have enough hours at my job right now. I've been a little worried about it, about making ends meet when I'm only scheduled for 26 hours a week. I mentioned trying to find a part-time job until things pick up again and I think at some point I also said something about really liking going to work. Enjoying my job. Well, I do! But I also have noticed that I feel the need to justify my time and if I'm not working I find myself feeling a little guilty. A lot guilty. Like if I'm not earning money I'm not amounting to much, not being productive. See, I believe that work is good for you. I believe in getting up everyday and going to work.

But why do I continue to think that my creative work is any different? Because I don't earn money for it?

It's still work.

Former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall wrote an entire book about it. It's called Life Work, and when I read it for the first time it had a huge impact on me. Obviously it didn't sink in too far. Sometimes I work all day at being a poet or a writer. Maybe I'm not always sitting at my desk or typing words onto the screen, but I'm working. I might be reading a book, or taking a walk, people watching or eavesdropping on a conversation, or even staring out the window. And while I know, very well, why this is important...it's still difficult to justify it as work.

On one of my earliest report cards my teacher comment says "Kateri would do well to spend as much time on her work as she does staring out the window."

I wonder.

I'm not a lazy person. I get things done. When I am on the clock, I am on the clock. And I show up for my writing every single day. No matter how little time I have, or how busy my day has been. I find the time. Because I have to.

Because it's my most important job, even if it never earns me a dime.

There, I said it.

I was feeling really guilty today for daydreaming about having these extra hours while my "work" schedule is light to work on my poems. To take longer walks. To crawl back into my nest of a bed with a hot cup of coffee and my writing. To stare out the window a little more often. I mean, how am I supposed to survive on 26 hours of pay a week when my average hourly wage is about $9.00? You know what? I can. I know I can. And it's only for a few months anyhow. Tighten the belt and make use of what's around me. Enjoy the things that are most valuable...and free. Family, friends, books on the shelves, paints on the table and 700 acres of snow-covered beauty right out my back door. And enough awareness to realize that my 'work' might look like daydreaming and idle reverie to some, but I know different. I know its worth. And I need to stop doubting it.

I didn't have this realization until I read from a book in my bath tonight. The first poem I turned to was by Billy Collins, and it goes like this (it's long, but worth it):

 

Monday by BIlly Collins

 

The birds are in their trees,

the toast is in the toaster,

and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows

in every section of the tangerine of earth-

the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,

the American poets gazing out

at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,

the miners are down in their mines,

and the poets are looking out their windows

maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong

game of proofreading,

glancing back and forth from page to page,

the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,

and the poets are at their windows

because it is their job for which

they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter

though many have a favorite,

for there is always something to see-

a bird grasping a thin branch,

the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,

those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,

the linemen climb their round poles,

the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,

and the poets continue to stare

at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying

that what the oven is to the baker

and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,

so the window is to the poet.

Just think-

before the invention of the window,

the poets would have had to put on a jacket

and a winter hat to go outside

or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,

I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper

and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,

the wall of the medieval sonnet,

the original woman's heart of stone,

the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

 

 

Sometimes a poem tells me exactly what I needed to hear. 

P.S. The photo was taken from my bed in my room at my dad's house in Northern Michigan. It is a perfect window for a poet. The water is different every single day. But in all honesty the view from my window right here at home is my very favourite in the world.

stuff to do when you can't snowshoe

This is one of my favourite trees at the farm next door. I went for a snowshoe there the other day, if you can call it that. Really, boots alone would have been fine all across the fields and even in the woods. We just don't have enough snow for my taste yet. I love me a harsh winter. While many folks dream of living someplace warm or at least temperate, I'm pretty much set on being somewhere that gets piles of the fluffy white stuff. Never mind inches...I'm talking feet.

Western New York has that reputation, but in the past few years it's been a little disappointing for polar bears like me. Today it snowed, though it certainly could have been more generous. I went to the city this morning for a doctor's appointment and decided to meander the snowy avenues for a while before I came home. Nothing like our gal Buffalo all adorned in white. :) I stopped in a little Middle Eastern joint to eat falafel, then walked to Main Street and paid a visit to my friends at our incredible local art supply store. Pardon the cliché, but every time I go there I'm like a kid in a candy store. There is one guy who has worked there forever who loves to talk about colour as much as I do, and so we stand in front of the Holbein watercolours and drool over swatches of alizarin crimson, indathrone blue, aureolin, rose carmethine and then some. Just saying the names out loud is delicious. I found a new love today, quinacridone red orange. He opened the tube, took a drop of it on his finger and spread it on the heel of his palm. 

"It's the closest colour to blood you'll find."

Well, he was right. It was gorgeous. Made my mouth water. Not for blood, but maybe for a blood orange. I was just saying to a friend the other day what a beautiful colour blood is. Rightfully so...it's the essence of what keeps us alive and ticking. My art store friend also explained the difference between modern and traditional pigments and why you can't find the colour sepia in oil or acrylic paints, only watercolour. I won't bore you...but it was fascinating to me. The folks at the art store are geeks about colour and texture just like some folks are geeks about math. I guess I'm one, too. Fine by me.

But what this brings me to is that I've decided I want to learn how to draw. I've done it my whole life, but I'm really not very good at it. I especially want to know how to draw the human face, and eventually how to paint it. Sure, I've tried, but my efforts always feel flat or have that deer in the headlights look. So how happy was I when I saw this on my friend Misty's online journal? Pretty damn happy. Class starts in just over a week and I'll have plenty of time during my long nights at work to give it the old college try. Maybe I'll even share some of my efforts here. It's an online class that utilizes blog technology and streaming video, and I tell you it's a great way to learn. You can really take your time, stop, rewind and attempt the lessons as many times as you need to (a bonus for, a-hem, slower folks like me). Misty is a sought after teacher and travels the world to share her talents, but it's never been convenient for me to attend one of her workshops...this way I can do it in my jammies if I need to!

There are some other online classes that you might want to know about. My friend Rick Ohler has a fantastic array of online options for those of you out-of-towners who can't attend his Tuesday and Thursday classes here in East Aurora.

An Online Visit With Your Grammar is his newest addition. Here is the course description:

Learn to correct the most common mistakes in English; and have some fun at the same time. Why lay around this winter whilst Lake Affect snows ravish your drive way why not put that time to good, use. In "An Online Visit With Your Grammar", you'll receive each Wednesday, an email with a Word attachment from moi. The attachment will contain a story which is full of mistakes, there will be errors in Punctation, Grammar, Spelling and Useage. You'll make corrections during the week. Everyone can work at their own pace. On the following Wednesday I send along the corrected version with explanations. Its good fun and cheap $twenty-two dollars. By the way there are no less than 20 errors in this course description. Maybe there's more. 

Another class that he offers is Online Creative Writing:

In this course writers will write from the comfort of their own homes, in their PJs if they like. They can work on weekly assignments provided by instructor Rick Ohler, OR, they can continue their own writing projects already under way. Using email and telephone, writer and instructor will set an eight-week goal and have weekly communication. Beginning and experienced writers of family histories, memoirs, fiction, essays and non-fiction are welcome. 

For more information on either of these classes just email Rick. He'll be more than happy to let you know how to get started.

I also have an online course starting this winter. Here is the course description from the East Aurora Continuing Education Web site:

Whether you're already filling notebooks with poetry or just have a longing to try, this 8-week workshop with Kateri Ewing will offer guidance and gentle criticism on how to craft your words into poems. We will meet in a virtual classroom filled with inspiration and instruction on the basics of craft. There will be introductions to schools of poetry, to poets both well-know and obscure, as well as a place to exchange ideas and post your own work for group discussion. During our final week we will meet face-to-face for a group reading and celebration at the Roycroft Inn. Students will leave with a greater understanding of poetry and some of the subtleties of craft, all from the comfort of their own home and with the convenience of their own schedule. Kateri will check the Web site daily for discussion, and provide weekly lessons and assignments. Please email Kateri for more information.

Of course if you are participating from far away and can't join us for the final celebration, there will be something special at the end for you, too :) 

Hope you are enjoying the winter no matter where you're sitting, and that you've made learning something new a priority for this brand spanking new year! And don't hesitate to wish for snow up here in Buffalo. The plow guys need it, the ski resorts need it, and my snowshoes need it, too :)

cries from the spirit

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."              

Muriel Rukeyser

I have two books that have been accompanying me everywhere I am lately. Both are poetry anthologies edited by Marilyn Sewell. If you look at my reading list in the side bar you'll find links to them. The quote above comes from the introduction to one of the books and it has been haunting me ever since I first read it.

What does it mean? What importance could one woman's truth possibly have? Certainly I have aimed to open my veins whenever I write something, either here, in my poems or even in my little newspaper column. But that doesn't mean my writing is a confessional. It's not about truth telling as far as the details...it's about the underlying bigger truths, and how things are perceived. I think that's what Rukeyser was getting at: the sacred parts of our experiences.

Think of the many women writers who have tried to tell the truth about their lives. We have some fine examples of famous, journal-writing women who might have been heavy on the confessional side of things: Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, May Sarton, ...bloodletters all. There is much to learn from their brave words and even though their experiences are personal, they give us a sense of "Oh yes! It's like that for me, too!" Other female writers have attempted telling the truth through their fiction and if we read carefully enough between the lines we can surmise quite a bit about what they were made of---but can they ever really state it outright: this is the bare bones truth of my life?

Think of our prim, American poetess Emily Dickinson. Scholars know there was much more to her life, and her words, than meets the eye. Read one or two biographies about her and her "master" or her intimate relationship with her sister-in-law and then reread her poems...you won't interpret them in the same way ever again. Not at all. Like her famous poem states: she told the truth, but told it slant. She was confessional through metaphor if she was confessional at all. It's hard to not assume the narrator of a poem is the author herself, but can we really ever know? Not in Emily's case, no.

So it brings me back to Rukeyser's quote. Is it possible to tell the truth about your life? And do we ever really know the truth? Isn't all personal truth simply perception? What could possibly be so earth shattering about one woman's truth that could split the world open?

I received a comment on my newspaper column the other day from another woman whom I admire. She said, "Your writing is so prophetic." I took it as a complement, but then I had to look the word up. Of course I thought I knew what it meant, but I had never thought of my writing that way before. I always thought it meant being able to predict the future in some way, and I know that's not what she was trying to say.

I still don't know what she meant and I plan to ask her, but I'm thinking it was something like what I'm writing about here, those cries from the spirit, things that surface from deep inside of us that just have to come out, like the cream rising to the top of the milk. It's what writing is to me: a way to witness, express and document those miraculous human experiences, just like why an artist might put paint to canvas, or a musician may bring forth melody and rhythm. A way of illuminating the sacred in the everyday, the things we don't always have words for, and why it's so hard to find those words sometimes. Maybe that's why Rukeyser said it would split the world open...maybe it's just never been done before. But as artists we keep trying. We just keep trying.

It's what I admire most in poetry, and it's what I aim for every time I sit down to write. It's not about truth as a confession...it's about truth as a witness. Sometimes it's important to share the personal experience, but it's about much more than that. Does that make sense? 

Something else comes to mind when I consider why it's so difficult to do. So often I think we are stunted by the cultural "institutions" that try to define what is sacred in the world. Think of it this way: why do we need baptism when we already have the miracle of birth? Why do we need the public ceremony of marriage when we have the private ceremony of making love? Why do we need the sacrament of last rites when we have the sacred passage of dying? Is it because we need a way to concretely mark these mysteries? Is it because they are in fact so intangible to us that we need something to hold on to to help us through? I don't know the answer, and maybe there isn't one. But I do believe it's the seed of the very reason humans feel the longing to create. The visceral becomes a little more dimensional when we seek to find a way to express it. Finding a way to tell the very truth may be like chasing the sunset...always there, but just beyond the horizon.

why is happiness unforgivable?

 I recently enjoyed a memoir by the poet, Donald Hall, called Life Work. The main theme of the book is work, in all of its nuances. There are many vignettes of his grandparents' work on their farm in New Hampshire, his father's dairy business, his childhood spent between suburban and rural life, and of course of his own work as a man of letters, but there is one sentence that has stuck with me and that has me picking the book up again and again to reread the chapter that contains it. 

When talking about the great pleasure he finds in his work on the best days, he stops and asks "Why is happiness unforgivable?" My first reaction was, "Is it? Really?" He was talking about when a more melancholy reader might pick up his book, and say "Enough already! My life sucks! Yours should, too," at least that is how I understood it the first time through, but I didn't feel that way at all, and I can be as melancholy as the next gal. Hey, if someone is happy, I'm happy for them. If they are fulfilled by a day's or even a lifetime's work, that's just fine by me. Because I know, I KNOW, that even the most cheerful, most successful among us has plenty of their own moments of glumness.

Happiness, like the grey smoke of incense, is fleeting. It lingers just long enough to fill our souls with ample sweetness to know that it's a good idea to carry on. Life, by nature, is hard. If we come upon any kind of happiness it should be relished...either our own or that of others. The more I thought about Hall's question, the more I realized that very often it is the happiness of others that helps to nurture my own moments of contentment. Just think, at any given moment there might be hundreds of happy people within walking distance of your home. ;) Even the thought of it can cajole a smile, if I allow it.

I'm not sure why Donald Hall's sentence struck me so hard. Maybe it's because I didn't believe he really felt that way. His own life has been brim with struggles and sorrows, more than anyone should have to bear, and yet he has also written about knowing profound joy through his work, through his second marriage, through his children and grandchildren. He is one man who seems to know what it means when the philosophers preach "You can't know joy unless you know sorrow." I guess it made me think that he doesn't have a lot of faith in his readers if he didn't trust them enough to know that he has a right to claim his deep happiness in his work. He's earned it. It gives me great hope, as another human being forging her way through life, to see that people, no matter how grave things can get, have the spirit to carry on...and even be happy. Happiness is not unforgivable. What would be unforgivable is to not give it its due praise. 

spring has not sprung...just yet

I have a bone to pick with the vernal equinox. I know, I know, it is very scientifically based on the date that daylight and night are equal partners, and that's really great. But I get a little edgy when it claims to be the first day of spring. I don't care if the weather of the 19-21 of March is sunny and warm or freezing cold, dreary and wet---they have got to be the ugliest few days of the year up here in the northeastern US of A. When I think of spring I think of flowers, the return of songbirds, and the thousands of shades of green that come only when the foliage is new. But this week? This week is mud, mud, drab looking lawns, mud, remnants of snow plows digging up yards, salt stained roads, and more mud. We may be gaining daylight, and there may be a confused robin poking about, but you just can't call it spring. Not yet. 

I think spring should open on May 1st. The first week of May is always spectacular. By the 7th of May almost every tree is in some form of awakening with a haze of burgeoning leaves in yellow or pale red or green. Blossoms abound. The ground has firmed up after the cleansing month of April, and things look fresh and promising again. There have been enough pleasant days to get outdoors and clean up our yards. You could probably even push me back to the last week in April...but anything before that? Winter's last hurrah...mud-season. The only thing good about mud-season in the northeast? Maple syrup. Other than that, give me two feet of snow, or give me abundant flowers.

One of my favourite modern American poets wrote a poem about mud season. Jane Kenyon lived in the northeast for most of her adult life. Like me she was a transplant, but she grew to love this part of the country as her own. This is her poem about that ambiguous time between winter and true spring...

 

Mud Season

Here in purgatory bare ground

is visible, except in shady places

where snow prevails.

 

Still, each day sees

the restoration of another animal:

a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp;

and, at twilight, the skunk

pokes out of the den,

anxious for mates and meals....

 

On the floor of the woodshed

the coldest imaginable ooze,

and soon the first shoots

of asparagus will rise,

the fingers of Lazarus....

 

Earth's open wounds---where the plow

gouged the ground last November---

must be smoothed; some sown 

with seed, and all forgotten.

 

Now the nuthatch spurns the suet,

resuming its diet of flies, and the mesh

bag, limp and greasy, might be taken

down.

 

Beside the porch step

the crocus prepares an exaltation

of purple, but for the moment

holds its tongue....

 

It's interesting, spring is the most celebrated and written about season by poets. Most of them drunk with the strewing of flowers, the theme of rebirth, spiritual resurrection. But one of my favourite poems about spring takes a different view.

 

Spring

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not here to bash any season. I love them all (winter best) and it's just the naming of the equinox as the first day of spring that bothers me. After a Buffalo winter we are all ready for the longer days, and that in itself is something to celebrate...but spring? It's just not quite here. Maybe we could just say that the vernal equinox is like giving mother nature the green light; it's time to start thinking about spring, but let's not abandon the remnants of winter too soon. (The photos in this post were taken while visiting Joe Meyer, Norm Kehl and their friends and family at their sugar shack in Bennington, NY, which only confirmed my opinion that maple syrup is the best thing about mud season.)

why

Every so often I tend to check myself. You know, question why it is that I have this compulsive love of words. I truly love them. I love the shapes of letters and I love how they look on the page, on a keyboard, on a chalkboard. I adore how they fan out and lift one at a time to strike the paper over the roller on an old typewriter. I love how they parade across a computer screen, one at a time, as I touch the keys. I love to read them, left to right, top to bottom between the covers of a book. I love the way words sound all on their own, or in careful, or even careless combinations. I love them. And I love to write them...much more than I love to say them.

I think it's only natural to want to write when you love to read. When you love letters and words and sentences and paragraphs...and stories. But there is more to it than that. And every so often I check myself as to why.

I have written about this very thing countless times in different ways here in the nest. But this time I am thinking more about why I love to read...and the answer to that is quintessentially why I need to write.

I love to read, I NEED to read, because it is a way to see how things work out. Life is a never-ending roller coaster ride of uncertainties. All stories, whether fiction or factual, are like a guidebook to almost every life situation, every uncertainty imaginable. It's all been lived before, folks. Like all the beautiful emails I have received from women who have walked the breast cancer road...I read those wise and generous words absolutely hungry for the wisdom of the journeys already taken and how it all turns out. Stories, good, true stories, make you CARE about how things all turn out. They make you want to find out how things end up. And that is what writing does, too.

Writing is a way to journey through something, on my own, for writing is always a solitary endeavor, to at least ATTEMPT to explain in words the things that I cannot sometimes even begin to explain to myself any other way. And I can make things up, things that may not have anything to do with my own uncertainties, and I can try to follow them through to their endings and maybe in that magical way that stories have, maybe I will sometimes find even a glimmer of truth in my own story. And another thing, perhaps the most important thing, is that when I am writing the world seems to fall away and the only thing that matters is the inexplicable mystery of putting letters down on the page, one after the other. It can be the highest form of bliss I know. Because...the visceral and even the physical act of writing is its own reward. Not the story at its end, not even the sharing of it, or the publishing of it, or hearing it read aloud...it's the very moment of doing it. Over and over again I can enter a space where the letters form words and the words make sentences and the sentences grow into paragraphs...

An escape? Yes. And the sanest way I have to attempt to understand. The act of writing is its own reward. And if I am very lucky, I'll have a story to share.