#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
It has lightly snowed overnight. Not enough to shovel, really. Tonight I open the poetry anthology on nature poems my daughter gave me for Christmas and find the perfect poem by John Updike for this day. Except for the burst milk bottles outside the door, the poem recounts the day. (I do remember the milk bottles from childhood, delivered from the dairy truck onto the doorstep!) We take a long walk, and it’s a busy time, busy days, so much to do to go away and a long list of activities and my Wednesday morning writers and an evening webinar to run. But I breathe, and I walk under the lacy trees and take it slow. There is time. I need this time in the fresh air. Tonight, I see an article from “Artsy” on Facebook about the artist Louise Bourgeois’ need for solitude as an antidote to anxiety, and it echoes what I felt, slowing myself down by the cattails and swamp and the black branches glistening in the meadow:
“For Bourgeois herself, solitude took different forms. Nature offered one escape. “I need to smell the grass, earth, and the wind from the sea,” she told Richarme. Even taking time alone to gaze at the sky could be enough to quell her anxieties, allowing inspiration to develop in their place. “Once I was beset by anxiety. I could have cried out with terror at being lost,” she recalled in a 1979 conversation with art historian Eleanor Munro. “But I pushed the fear away—by studying the sky, determining where the moon would come out, where the sun would appear in the morning. I saw myself in relationship to the stars.””