#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Maple Wing Bouquet
In my Wednesday morning writer’s group, during our weekly meditation (moving or still and silent) I stood and stretched, stretched my arms up over my head, eyes closed, and imagined I was a woodland fern unfurling in spring. Today I felt such ease of movement and spirit. Sunshine and fresh air, creative juices flowing freely. My computer back just in time to prepare a warm-up for my writer’s group. I walked on the muddy trail, churning with new blooms and maple wings in bouquets fallen from the sky. Today, the irritability vanished. I did not have to struggle with it. I felt happy. Just happy. And happiness met me all day in the people I met with. An Instagram follower shared spontaneous gratitude for the poem about lady slippers that I posted, how it reminded her of PLACE connected to her mother and grandmother, to see the slippers and read my poem. And PLACE was the theme of the warm-up I brought to my group, and the writing that resulted rocked the floor boards of the studio. I designed the prompt, about birthplace versus the places where “the heart finds rest,” from this quote I found in the Paris Review, in a 1968 interview with the poet Robert Creeley. The interviewer asks,
You speak a great deal about the poet’s locale, his place, in your work. Is this a geographic term, or are you thinking of an inner sense of being?
To which Creeley responds:
I’m really speaking of my own sense of place. Where “the heart finds rest,” as Robert Duncan would say. I mean that place where one is open, where a sense of defensiveness or insecurity and all the other complexes of response to place can be finally dropped. Where one feels an intimate association with the ground underfoot.
[EXCERPT FROM Robert Creeley, The Art of Poetry No. 10
Interviewed by Lewis MacAdams and Linda Wagner-Martin
ISSUE 44, FALL 1968
A writing client I work with shared a generous and lovely tribute to me that she wrote about our work together, and it was very moving to know how supported and creatively inspired she feels through our connection. Hearing this from her was a gift. Positive feedback is such a natural mood enhancer. Plants don’t speak, but they can make you feel seen to the core. Did I give some positive feedback today? Yes. I had many opportunities, especially in my writing group, because this group supports each writer to delve deeply, be vulnerable, take risks, be honest, and when you write about what you know best and love the most, you write well. Someone, later in the day, as I was passing, someone I know well and care about, asked me for a hug. Just like that. Because she needed one. And, of course, I gave it. I was so glad she asked, because I was busy, rushing out the door, and how else would I have known? I am transplanting ferns from our woods here and there as I do every spring to bring them closer to the house, to bring them everywhere to do their magic of greenly enchantment. Because I feel freer and stronger and looser and more flexible and I breathe better when the ferns are looking at me. Ferns are like the special friends I was with tonight. We met to say goodbye to one of us who is leaving town, leaving vicinity, leaving this place we call home for each other. Here is the second quote I used to inspire today’s prompt about place:
“Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, “from the faraway nearby.” It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Wild Geranium in Ferns